The Nobel Prize, Life, and Legacy

Abstract

Paul Samuelson is not the definitive economist known most broadly among laypeople. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the names of John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman were more familiar. At the start of the new millennium, we have perhaps heard of Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman. In the first half of the twentieth century, Professor Irving Fisher was well known. Among finance theorists, William Sharpe, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, Michael Jensen, and Eugene Fama might be more familiar, perhaps because each, except Fama, had their name immortalized in the names of famous equations or coefficients. However, among financial and economic scholars, Samuelson stands alone, much like Albert Einstein might among physicists, or Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun among rocketeers.