Friends, family gather to honor Paul Samuelson
Family members, friends and admirers gathered to pay tribute to Paul Samuelson during a memorial service on Saturday at MIT, where the legendary economist was recalled as a man of kindness, unyielding good humor and boundless intellectual curiosity.Several hundred people attended the service in honor of Samuelson, a singular figure in 20th-century economics whose work reshaped the subject into a highly rigorous, mathematical discipline, and whose energy and renown quickly helped build one of the world’s leading economics departments after his arrival at MIT in 1940.“He achieved that stature and transformed his field in a way that I think of as quintessentially MIT,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield at the service. “He entered a discipline that was largely descriptive and he used the tools of mathematics to make it rigorous, coherent, and predictive. In his commitment to both the research and teaching of economics, he embodied an MIT ideal.” Moreover,...