Geary was born in
Dublin, Ireland and received his secondary education at the
O'Connell School. He went on to study mathematics and mathematical physics at the
University College Dublin, where he obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 1916 and 1918, respectively. He was awarded a scholarship to continue his study at the
Sorbonne in Paris, where he attended lectures by
Émile Borel,
Élie Cartan,
Édouard Goursat,
Henri Lebesgue, and
Paul Langevin. Geary returned to Ireland in 1921, and was offered a lecturer position in mathematics at the
University of Southampton (1922–23) and in applied economics at
Cambridge University (1946–47). He was a statistician in the Department of Industry and Commerce between 1923 and 1957. The
National University of Ireland conferred a Doctorate of Science on him in 1938. Geary was the founding director of the
Central Statistics Office (Ireland) (in 1949). He was head of the
National Accounts Branch of the
United Nations in
New York from 1957 to 1960. He was the founding director of the
Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in 1960 where he stayed till his retirement in 1966. He was an honorary fellow of the
American Statistical Association and the
Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 1981, he won the
Boyle Medal. To honour his contributions to social sciences, the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy was named after him in 2005. ==Works==