The seer of economics, a `generalist' who had his "finger in every pie" within the field of economics, leaving his seemingly simple but intrinsically complex question—"Is there not some realistic tradeoff between more equality and more cumulative progress?"—for us to ponder, died on December 9, 2009 .

The discipline of economics lost one of its giants in the death of Paul Anthony Samuelson, an Institute Professor Emeritus and Gordon Y Billard Fellow at MIT, who, right from 1932, enlivened the waiting "sleeping beauty of political economy" with his "kiss of new methods, new paradigms, new hired hands and new problems" till he died at his home in Massachusetts at the ripe age of 94.

Paul Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, US, in 1915. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1935 from the University of Chicago. Being "never one to blindly accept adult advice", he, despite the advice of his mentors in Chicago to join Columbia University, moved to Harvard, of course, `by miscalculation', to obtain a master's in 1936 and a PhD in 1941. In 1940, when Harvard offered him instructorship, he accepted it, but later switched over to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when they invited him as assistant professor, and later in 1947 became the professor of economics. In a span of seven decades, he transformed MIT into an economics powerhouse—all by virtue of finding early in his life such a kind of work that "has been pure fun".

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