Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

Who was Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen?

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu was a Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist, best known for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which situated the view that the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., that usable "free energy" tends to disperse or become lost in the form of "bound energy", governs economic processes.

Georgescu-Roegen's influence extends well beyond his well-known work on the thermodynamic foundations of economic systems and his career involved "his ambitious attempt to reformulate economic process as 'bioeconomics,' a new style of dialectical economic thought". He is therefore considered "one of the key intellectual progenitors of ecological economics" and of what would become the "minimal bioeconomic program."