Paul Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, the son of a
drugstore owner. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1941
from Harvard University and spent his academic career at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Samuelson is generally regarded as one of the greatest
economic theorists of the twentieth century. While still a
graduate student at Harvard, Samuelson wrote most of
Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), which was path-
breaking at the time and used mathematical analysis and
constrained optimization techniques to shed insight into
economic behaviour. He systematized economic theory into a
more rigorous mathematical discipline, which has had
enormous effects on the way economics is studied today.