Marquis de Condorcet

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743 to 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, political economist, politician and mathematician. In 1785 he published his Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, which described Condorcet's jury theorem, on the probability that a voting group reaches a correct decision as it grows, and Condorcet's paradox, in which majority preferences become intransitive among three or more options. The essay also outlines a generic Condorcet method, designed to simulate pairwise elections between all candidates, and he disagreed strongly with the rival aggregation method of Jean-Charles de Borda. These results are the ground of later work on voting procedures as algorithms. He was elected to the Academie royale des Sciences on 25 February 1769 and became an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1785.