W. M. Gorman

William "Terence" Moore Gorman (17 June 1923 - 12 January 2003) was an Irish economist and academic. He was predominantly a theorist and is most famous for his work on aggregation and separability of goods, and in this context he developed his famous Gorman polar form. Gorman's career saw him a professor at such schools as Oxford, London School of Economics, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford, and he was honored with the Presidency of the Econometric Society in 1972. His work was often highly technical and theoretical in nature, which made him incomprehensible to many of his contemporaries, but his keen eye for applications has given his work a lasting influence on modern economics.

Young life

Gorman was born in Kesh in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland on 17 June 1923. He spent his early childhood in Lusaka, Rhodesia, where his African Nanny called him Terence, saying that William was not a proper Irish name; he was subsequently known as Terrence, or 'Terry', throughout his life. Following the shooting dead of his father when Gorman was four years old, he returned with his mother and her staff to his mother's family's estate in Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, where he was brought up.

He attended Mount Temple College in Dublin, an exclusive preparatory school, and Foyle College (now "Foyle and Londonderry College") in Derry before moving on to Trinity College, Dublin in 1941. From 1943 to 1946, he served in the Royal Navy as a Rating and then Petty Officer before finally graduating from Trinity in 1948 in Economics and in 1949 in Mathematics, by which time he was involved with Alan Turing on the development of the computer. While at Trinity, he met his future wife, Dorinda. Gorman was highly influenced by Trinity Professor, George A. Duncan, as well as by James Davidson at Foyle College.

Academic career

He began his career at the University of Birmingham in England where he taught from 1949 to 1962. Birmingham was at that time a leading centre for theoretical research, employing such luminaries as Gorman, Frank Hahn, and Maurice McManus. It was during this time that what is now called Gorman polar form was rigorously introduced in an article entitled, “On a class of preference fields,” published in the journal Metroeconomica, in August 1961.

He moved on from Birmingham serving as chair of Economics at Oxford beginning in 1962, and then as chair at the London School of Economics in 1967, where he introduced an American style mathematical economics program. He served as a fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford from 1979 a Senior Research Fellow in 1984 and an Emeritus Fellow in 1990. He also spent time in the United States as a Visiting Fellow, doing research at Iowa, Johns Hopkins, North Carolina, and Stanford.

After retirement, he continued to live in Oxford, although he spent his summers in County Cork, until in his last years illness impaired his mobility.

Approach to Economics

Gorman credited his early education at Trinity and Foyle for teaching him "to think of mathematics and economics as styles of thought, not collections of theorems," and his experience at Birmingham taught him "to think of the social sciences as a unity with history as one way of holding them together" [http://www.esr.ie/Vol34_2Neary.pdf] . With this foundation, Gorman's theory was based both in empirical research and on the opinions and views of social scientists. But above all, Gorman was a mathematically talented economist, and his penchant for inter-disciplinarianism was only present in as much as that diversity presented him with tools to use or develop in order to explore the links between individual preferences and market behavior, which is, after all, one of the most central issues in economics.

Awards, Honors and Honorary Positions

* Presidency of the Econometric Society in 1972
* Fellowship of the British Academy
* Membership of Academia Europaea
* Honorary foreign membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
* Honorary foreign membership of the American Economic Association
* Honorary doctorate from University College London
* Honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham
* Honorary doctorate from the University of Southampton
* Honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 1986
* Honorary fellowship from Trinity College, Dublin

The Gorman Lectures

The Gorman Lectures in Economics, named after W. M. Gorman, is an annual project that takes place at the Department of Economics of University College London. The lectures are not confined to any sub-discipline of economics, and they are usually developed into a book by published by co-sponsor, Princeton University Press. The first lectures were delivered by Nobel Laureate Professor James Heckman of Chicago University in December 2001. Avinash Dixit delivered the lectures in 2003.

Resources

* Honohan, Patrick, and Neary, J Peter. "W. M. Gorman (1923–2003)." The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer/Autumn, 2003, pp. 195-209 [http://www.esr.ie/Vol34_2Neary.pdf]
* "On a class of preference fields," Metroeconomica, 13, August 1961, 53-56.