'One of the Greatest Teachers That Economics Has Ever Known'
文章转自《the Wall Street Journal》
Paul A. Samuelson, whose analytical work laid the foundation for modern economics, died Sunday. He was 94. "Paul Samuelson was both a path-breaking and prolific economic theorist and one of the greatest teachers that economics has ever known," said Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, a former student of Mr. Samuelson's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I join with many other former students and colleagues of Paul's in mourning the passing of a titan of economics." Remembering Samuelson 'One of the Greatest Teachers That Economics Has Ever Known' Actively publishing into the 2000s, Mr. Samuelson's career in economics spanned eight decades. As a high school student in 1932, he wandered into an economics lecture at the University of Chicago and was enamored. But attending Chicago as an undergraduate, he became keenly aware, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, of the differences between what was being taught in the classroom and "what I heard out the windows and I heard from the street." In 1935 he went, despite his Chicago professors' protestations, to Harvard University for his graduate work. His 1941 Ph.D. thesis, later published as "Foundations of Economic Analysis," examined the mathematical structure underlying economics. The approach revolutionized the field. "For me, it is a special bereavement," said Princeton University economist Avinash Dixit. "My whole style of research, and the techniques that support almost all of my own papers, derive from his foundational articles." Mr. Samuelson started teaching at MIT in 1940, the beginning of a lifelong association with the university that helped its economics program become the most highly-regarded in the world. "Economics," first published in 1948, was for years the most popular undergraduate economics textbook and, now in its 19th edition, is still widely used. In 1970, he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, the second year the prize was offered. "Samuelson's contribution has been that, more than any other contemporary economist, he has contributed to raising the general analytical and methodological level in economic science," wrote the Nobel prize committee. "He has in fact simply rewritten considerable parts of economic theory