The creator of "The Eipiphiny" and "The Aakkozzll"
We've put this little web site together to honour our father, Burke Avery Brown, who was an inspiration to us (his children) and countless others to whom he gave of himself.
Burke was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, attended the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute for high school and then graduated with a Master’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1952.
His immediate goal was to work in the private sector in business to earn and save enough money to support his family and return to university as a researcher in human behaviour.
His interest was in man’s economic behaviour, having written his Master’s Thesis on the “Hoarding Instinct in Lab Rats”. Spurred on by the words of Sir Maurice G. Kendall* in his 1960 inaugural address as the president of the Royal Statistical Society,
“There has been a feeling that perhaps something analogous to the laws of [the] physical sciences might be found to operate in the behaviourial sciences.”,
Burke set out to find those laws in his spare time, never returning to university to continue his research.
During his successful 50-year career in business, Burke came to be known as the “go-to person” for raising capital for smaller technology deals. He was a financial consultant to government, innovators, and inventors and was a founding director of the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation and the Canadian Industrial Innovation Centre, at the University of Waterloo.
His lifelong search for a law of human economic behaviour led him to the realization we must try to instill, from childhood, a love for mathematics and stochastics in order to be better informed citizens. Burke was particularly concerend with the unequal distribution of wealth and how this might be rectified in future generations.
Thus Burke's two pet projects were born - the Eipiphiny and the Aakkozzl.