Max Otto Lorenz (/ˈlɒrənts/; September 19, 1876 – July 1, 1959) was an American economist who developed the Lorenz curve in an undergraduate essay.^[1] He published a paper on this when he was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.^[2] His doctoral thesis (1906) was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper. The term "Lorenz curve" for the measure Lorenz invented was coined by Willford I. King in 1912.

He was of German ancestry, his father having been born in Essen in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1841.^[3]

He was active in both publishing and teaching and was at various times employed by the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Railway Economics, the U.S. Bureau of Statistics and the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1917 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.^[4]

He was married to Nellie, and fathered three sons.

• Lorenz, M. O. (1905). Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth Publications of the American Statistical Association. Vol. 9 (New Series, No. 70) 209–219.doi:10.2307/2276207
• Richard T. Ely, Adams, Thomas A. Adams, Max O. Lorenz, and Allyn Young (1908). Outlines of Economics. New York: Macmillan.
• King, W.I. (1912). The Elements of Statistical Method. New York: Macmillan.
• A discussion of generalised Lorenz curves:
• Some history of economists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison school around John R. Commons:
• Christian Kleiber and Samuel Kotz (2003). Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences. Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics. Wiley. p. 263. doi:10.1002/0471457175. ISBN 978-0-471-15064-0. S2CID 152385446.
• "Max O. Lorenz". JSTOR.