Samuelson, Paul Anthony

SAMUELSON, PAUL ANTHONY (1915– ), U.S. economist. Born in Gary, Indiana, Samuelson received his B.A. from Chicago University in 1935 and his M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1941) from Harvard University. He first taught at Harvard (1937) and from 1940 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was appointed professor in 1960. From 1941 to 1943 he served as consultant to the National Resources Board, from 1945 to the War Production Board, and from 1945 to 1952 to the U.S. Treasury. In 1948 and 1949 he was chairman of the U.S. President's Task Force for Maintaining American Prosperity. His major interests were economic theory, statistics, business cycles, mathematical programming and econometrics.

In 1970 he was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his efforts to "raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory." From 1966 to 1981 he wrote a regular column in Newsweek.

After retiring from teaching, he became professor emeritus at MIT.

Among his many published and widely translated works are Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947); Economics – An Introductory Analysis (1948, 18^th edition 2004), the bestselling economics textbook of all time; Readings in Economics (1952, third edition 1958); Linear Programming and Economic Analysis (with R. Dorfman and R.M. Solow, 1958); Stability and Growth in the American Economy (Stockholm, 1963); International Economic Relations (1969); Economics from the Heart (1983); and The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson (five volumes, 1966–86).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Current Biography Yearbook 1965 (1965), 356–9. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Linder and J. Sensat, The Anti-Samuelson (2005).