Who is Thomas Robert Malthus from The Worldly Philosophers and what is their importance?

Thomas Robert Malthus was a minister, who was interested in the size of the population and its affects on economic welfare. He wrote an essay in which he claimed that the size of the population was limited by the size of the food supply. This earned economics the distinction of being known as the dismal science, and Malthus spent most of his life in academic research and in teaching. In 1820, he published Principles of Political Economy. Malthus died in 1834.