Paul Samuelson — econ (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Paul Anthony Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, on 15 May 1915, the son of Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and Ella Lipton. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his parents: the finding aid to his papers at MIT describes him as the son of Russian-born parents. Samuelson himself described his family as upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered during the First World War in the new steel town of Gary; the Poland they came from was then under Russian rule, and his father's family is recorded as coming from Raczki, in the Suwałki Governorate. His mother's town is not documented.
The family moved to Chicago in 1923, and he went to Hyde Park High School. He entered the University of Chicago at sixteen and later dated his calling exactly: at eight o'clock on the morning of 2 January 1932, in a lecture on Malthus, he was, as he put it, born as an economist. He graduated in 1935 and went to Harvard, where he took his master's degree in 1936 and his doctorate in 1941, studying with Joseph Schumpeter, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler and Alvin Hansen.
In 1940 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he stayed for the rest of his career and helped build its economics department; during the Second World War he also worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. His doctoral work became Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), which recast much of economics in mathematical form, and in 1947 he received the first John Bates Clark Medal. His textbook Economics, first published in 1948, went through many editions and introduced generations of students to the subject.
In 1970 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his contributions to economic theory. He received the National Medal of Science in 1996. His brother, Robert Summers, was also an economist, as is his nephew Lawrence Summers, and Kenneth Arrow was his brother-in-law.
He died at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, on 13 December 2009, aged ninety-four.
Tracing the roots — Russian Poland — father from Raczki, Suwałki Governorate (now Poland); mother's town not documented
His parents, Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and Ella Lipton, were Jewish immigrants born in the Russian Empire; Samuelson described the family as upwardly mobile immigrants from Poland, then partly under Russian rule.
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Russian Poland — father from Raczki, Suwałki Governorate (now Poland); mother's town not documented. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Good questions outrank easy answers."