Villfredo Pareto is a reknowned economist. He is the one who elucidated the famous "80-20" rule which is also known as the "Pareto Principle." Usually one encounters this in sales, and it takes the form of 80% of sales coming from 20% of the customers. However, it's a phenomenon that crops up unusually often in many different statistical analyses of human endeavor.

Pareto is mentioned in many contemporary textbooks on economics. That's an interesting distinction as most intellectuals who supported the Axis during the war have been whitewashed out of history.

Here is a link from the VNN home page about

Pareto:http://www.nyx.net/~jkalb/misc/pareto.html