Samuelson, Paul (Anthony)

(born May 15, 1915, Gary, Ind., U.S.) U.S. economist. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1940, becoming an emeritus professor in 1986. His Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) outlines a basic theme of his work, the universal nature of consumer behaviour as the key to economic theory. His studies included the dynamics of economic systems, analyses of public goods, welfare economics, and public expenditure. His most influential work was perhaps his mathematical formulation of multiplier and accelerator effects and, in consumption analysis, his development of the theory of revealed preference. His classic Economics (1948) is the best-selling U.S. economics textbook of all time. For his fundamental contributions to nearly all branches of economics, he became in 1970 the third person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Samuelson, Paul (Anthony) (1915– ) economist; born in Gary, Ind. By age 26 he had obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard and secured a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His distinguished career included writings on a wide variety of subjects in economics—international trade, production theory, capital theory, financial analysis, growth theory, and the history of economic thought. His textbook, Economics (McGraw-Hill, 1948; 11th ed., 1980) has been translated into over a dozen languages. He received the Nobel Prize in economics (1970).