Chicago, Dec 13 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Paul A. Samuelson has died, aged 94 years. His great analytical work laid the foundation for modern economics. He is said to be a path-breaking, prolific economic theorist as well as a great economics teacher too.

He had a very distinguished career in economics that spanned 8 decades, and despite advancing age, he still kept on publishing papers on economics well, into his 90s too. The Indiana born Paul studied at the University of Chicago and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935. He then completed his Master of Arts degree in 1936, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1941 from the Harvard University. His 1941 Ph.D. thesis, which was later published as “Foundations of Economic Analysis,” examined the mathematical structure underlying economics. And this novel approach revolutionized the whole 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.”

Paul A. Samuelson began teaching in MIT in 1940, and then in 1970 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was the second recipient of the prize after it was launched the previous year in 1969.

“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.”