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Paul Anthony Samuelson, an American economist, was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1915. He was educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. In 1941 he joined the economics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where in 1966 he was named institute professor, the highest professional rank at the institution. In those years he was also appointed to the rank of president of the American Economic Association in 1961. In 1947, he won the John Bates Clark award which is given to the most outstanding economist under the age of forty. Samuelson has at various times served as a columnist for Newsweek magazine, a consultant to such research organizations as the Rand Corporation and to the Federal Reserve Board, as well as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. As a popular lecturer, Samuelson is also the author of a best-selling economics textbook. This textbook which was originally published in 1948, Economics: An Introductory Analysis has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has sold more than 4 million copies. In this work Samuelson clearly and carefully tells in mathematical and quantitative terms his middle-of-the-road economic philosophy. This philosophy was based largely on the theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. He uses mathematics to explain relationships among economic phenomena. For example, he has evolved formulas to relate gross national product to levels of employment and to analyze the balance between prices and supply and demand. For his contribution to economic theory, Samuelson was awarded in 1970 the Nobel Prize in economics. He was the first American to win the prize for economics.

Another of Samuelson's literary achievements was the book, "Foundations of Economic Analysis," which greatly increased the use of mathematics in economics. According to samuelson, almost all behavior could be understood as maximizing or minimizing...