Tony Atkinson, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, who had been awarded the EIB Prize for excellence in economics and social research in 2015 for his outstanding contribution to the measurement of inequality, died on Sunday in Oxford at the age of 72.

Sir Anthony Atkinson was responsible for establishing the modern field of inequality and poverty studies in Britain. One of his mentees, Thomas Piketty, described him as “the godfather of historical studies of income and wealth.”

He was the author of more than 40 books. The most recent – 2015’s “Inequality: What Can Be Done?” – sums up over four decades of findings and offers 15 proposals for tackling the “inequality turn”, describing the period when household inequality began to rise around 1980. Atkinson was president of the board of the Luxembourg Income Study, having advised on its creation in the 1980s.