Vilfredo Pareto: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (; Italian: [paˈreːto]; born Wilfried Fritz Pareto; 15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923) was an Italian polymath, whose areas of interest included sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices, and was one of the minds behind the Lausanne School of economics. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term elite in social analysis and contributed to elite theory. He has been described as "one of the last Renaissance scholars. Trained in physics and mathematics, he became a polymath whose genius radiated into nearly all other major fields of knowledge."

He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. He was also the first to claim that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him, and it was built on his observations that 80% of the wealth in Italy belonged to about 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of mathematics and sociology.