My Science School

          Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone was an outstanding figure in post-war British applied econometrics. Stone was born on 30th August 1913, in London.

          He was an eminent British economist. Stone was educated in Westminster School, and Cambridge University. In 1984, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities on a national and, later, an international scale.

          He visited India along with his father, as his father was appointed as a judge in Madras. He returned to London in 1931.

          He is sometimes known as the ‘father of national income accounting’. The first official estimates of British national income and expenditures were made according to Stone’s method in 1941.

          He was co-author with J.E. Meade of ‘National Income and Expenditure’ and author of several other works.

          He died on 6th December 1991 at the age of 78, in England.

          The American economist James Tobin received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1981 for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production, and prices.

          James Tobin was born on 5th March 1918 in the US. He served as a member of President John F. Kennedy’s the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He was with the University of Yale since 1950.

          A collection of his selected articles, ‘National Economic Policy’, was published in 1966.

          In 1970, Tobin was president of the American Economic Association. Tobin was widely known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the ‘Tobin tax’. This was designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets. He died on 11th March 2002, in Connecticut, US.

          Paul Samuelson used mathematics to formulate influential economic theories and, in 1970, became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He was awarded the prize for actively contributing to raising the level of  analysis in economic science.

          Samuelson was born on 15th May 1915, in Gary, US, in a family that emigrated from Poland. In 1923, he moved to Chicago, where he began studying economics at the university. He presented his doctoral thesis at Harvard in 1941. Named an assistant professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1940, Samuelson eventually became an institute professor during his longtime association with the university.

          He served as an advisor to two American presidents, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Samuelson was probably the most influential economist of the later 20th century. He wrote the best-selling book ‘Economics’ in 1948, which was later translated into 20 languages; it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

          Samuelson died on 13th December 2009, at the age of 94.