Paul Samuelson Obituary

2009-12-14 | Filed Under RichardH's Posts |

An excellent obituary of Paul Samuelson in the New York Times (14 December 2009).

The 1970 Economic Sciences Nobel webpage with links to Samuelson’s Nobel addresses and selected other articles.

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One Response to “Paul Samuelson Obituary”

  1. SteveG on 2009-12-15 11:13 am

    Agreed, it is an excellent obituary. I learned things about Samuelson and Economics that I didn’t know from only learning economics from his book.

    A small quibble however. There was no mention of what behavioral economics has learned that tempers the desire to turn economics into a hard science by the application of mathematical theorems.

    You might have thought the following paragraph might have lead to an interesting tangent:

    Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel Prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes. They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives.

    That might be a bit much to expect in an obituary.

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