| Roy C. Geary | |
| Birth Name: | Robert Charles Geary |
| Birth Date: | April 11, 1896 |
| Birth Place: | Dublin, Ireland |
| Death Place: | Dublin, Ireland |
| Nationality: | Irish |
| Alma Mater: | University College Dublin Sorbonne University |
| Doctoral Advisors: | )--> |
| Workplaces: | University of Southampton Department of Industry and Commerce ESRI |
| Known For: | Geary's C Stone–Geary utility function |
Robert (Roy) Charles Geary (April 11, 1896 – February 8, 1983)[1] was an Irish mathematician, statistician and founder of both the Central Statistics Office and the Economic and Social Research Institute. Geary is known for his contributions to the estimation of errors-in-variables models,[2] Geary's C, the Geary–Khamis dollar, the Stone–Geary utility function, and Geary's theorem,[3] which has that if the sample mean is distributed independently of the sample variance, then the population is distributed normally.[4] [5]
Geary was born in Dublin, Ireland and received his secondary education at the O'Connell School. He went on to study mathematics and mathematical physics at the University College Dublin, where he obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 1916 and 1918, respectively. He was awarded a scholarship to continue his study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he attended lectures by Émile Borel, Élie Cartan, Édouard Goursat, Henri Lebesgue, and Paul Langevin. Geary returned to Ireland in 1921, and was offered a lecturer position in mathematics at the University of Southampton (1922–23) and in applied economics at Cambridge University (1946–47). He was a statistician in the Department of Industry and Commerce between 1923 and 1957. The National University of Ireland conferred a Doctorate of Science on him in 1938.
Geary was the founding director of the Central Statistics Office (Ireland) (in 1949). He was head of the National Accounts Branch of the United Nations in New York from 1957 to 1960. He was the founding director of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in 1960 where he stayed till his retirement in 1966. He was an honorary fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 1981, he won the Boyle Medal.[6] To honour his contributions to social sciences, the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy was named after him in 2005.[7]