Economics legend dies
PAUL A. Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, died yesterday aged 94.
An undergraduate at the University of Chicago and a graduate student at Harvard University, his 1941 PhD thesis, the “Foundations of Economic Analysis” is widely acknowledged for transforming and laying the foundations of modern economics.
Samuelson taught from 1940 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gaining world renown for its economics course.
In 1970, he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, the second year the prize was offered.
His 1948 textbook, “Economics: An Introductory Analysis” sold over 4m copies and was widely translated.
“Paul Samuelson was both a path-breaking and prolific economic theorist and one of the greatest teachers that economics has ever known,” said Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve and former student of Samuelson’s at MIT.