Bulletin Spring‧Summer 2001

Amartya Kumar Sen PhD, DLitt, DSc, LLD, Nobel Laureate in Economics Prof. Amartya Sen is a man who has taken the pulse of modern economic life and understands many o f the implications of its alarmingly irregula r beat. So profound and persuasive are his diagnoses of the economics of inequality, poverty and deprivation among the peoples of the world, that last year he was awarded an overdue, according to some, Nobel Prize in economics. Amartya Sen was born in November 1933 into an academic family in Santiniketan, India. His father was professor of chemistry and his grandfather professor of Sanskrit. Prof. Sen's writings demonstrate the combination of literary humanism and scientific method , w i th its patient classification, mathematical formulae, and rigorous technical analyses. His work is informed by compassion for the victims of economic forces that ensure the sufferings of the world's poor but escape their understanding. Let us recall G.B. Shaw's words from his play Major Barbara: T h e greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty,' We can then understand some of Prof. Sen's motivation for trying to reveal the causes and mechanisms o f poverty and for making its study a great part of his life's work. Prof. Sen gained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953 at Presidency College in Calcutta, took a second Bachelor of Arts degree at Trinity College, Cambridge two years later, having won the A d am Smith Prize and a Wrenbury Scholarship. A rme d wit h the Stevenson Prize of 1956, he went on to get his Cambridge Ph.D. in 1959. His brilliance was of course rewarded by his own college's prizes, including a Prize Fellowship in 1957 ， and, most recently, Trinity's welcoming h im back as Master. Yet he has not confined himself to Cambridge: he has been Professor of economics at Jadavpur University in Calcutta (1956-58), and at the University of Delhi's Delhi School of Economics (1963—71); he has been professor of economics at the London School of Economics (1971-77); he has had visiting professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960-61), Stanford (1961 )， Berkeley (1964-65), Harvard (1968-69), and was Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large in Cornell (1978-84). Again extending his reach across the Atlantic to the American Cambridge, he became Lamont University professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University (1987-98), and a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Society of 55th C o n g r e g a t i o n