Short answers, pulled from the story.
Friedrich August von Hayek was an Austrian economist and philosopher who lived from the 8th of May 1899 to the 23rd of March 1992. He was a major contributor to the Austrian school of economics and is known for his work in political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history.
Friedrich Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as the contribution that led to the prize.
The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, warns of the tyranny that Hayek argued results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning. It contends that abandoning individualism and classical liberalism leads toward an oppressive society. The title was inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville's writing on the road to servitude.
Friedrich Hayek was uncomfortable being called a conservative and preferred to be thought of as a classical liberal or libertarian. He defended a market order in which the state mainly enforces the legal rules that allow free individuals to function.
Friedrich Hayek was a second cousin of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, related on the non-Jewish side of the Wittgenstein family. Through that connection Hayek was among the first to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when it appeared in German in 1921.
Friedrich Hayek argued that the price mechanism shares and synchronises the dispersed knowledge held by individuals across a society. He held that a central planning authority could never gather the information that prices coordinate automatically, which is why central planning fails.
Margaret Thatcher held up Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty at a 1975 Conservative meeting and said it was what the party believed. Ronald Reagan listed Hayek among the two or three people who most influenced his philosophy and welcomed him to the White House.