Lucien March

Lucien March (6 December 1859 – 4 April 1933) was a French demographer, statistician, and engineer.

In 1878 Lucien March enrolled in l'École polytechnique and after graduation in 1880 served in the naval artillery corps. He was the director of the Statistique générale de la France (SGF) from 1896 to 1920. In 1896, he introduced Hollerith punched card tabulating machines into France and later invented an improved machine, the classifier-counter-printer, which was used until the 1940s. He also arranged a sorting process using the workplace addresses of the people counted in the French population census to generate valuable economic data and labor statistics.

He was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rome (1908), Toronto (1924), and Bologna (1928).

In 1912, upon his return from an international congress on eugenics, held in London, March helped to found a French eugenics society, which published in 1922 Eugénique et Sélection, a collection of essays on eugenics. In the 1920s he played an important role in the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations.