Frisch, Ragnar

Frisch, Ragnar (1895-1973), Norwegian economist and Nobel laureate, born in Oslo, and educated at the University of Oslo. From 1931 to 1965 Frisch was a professor of social economy and statistics and director of the Institute for Social Economy at Oslo. In the 1930s, he was a pioneer in the new science of econometrics, the use of mathematical formulae based on statistics in solving economic problems. In 1930, as visiting professor at Yale University, he founded the Econometrics Society, and he was the editor of the society journal Econometrica until 1955. For this work Frisch shared the first Nobel Prize for Economics (1969) with the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen.