Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981 for "creative and extensive work on the analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices." He had previously won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1955.
The Tobin tax is a proposed levy on foreign exchange transactions, designed to reduce speculation in international currency markets. Tobin argued that such speculation was dangerous and unproductive, and the tax was meant to discourage it.
Tobin spent the bulk of his career at Yale University, where he moved in 1950 and remained until his formal retirement in 1988. He was appointed Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale in 1957 and was associated with the Cowles Foundation there.
The tobit model, introduced by Tobin in 1958, is a standard econometric technique for regression analysis when the dependent variable is censored, meaning it is bounded above or below a threshold. It is named after Tobin and remains a widely used statistical tool.
Tobin served as a member of John F. Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers during 1961-62 under chairman Walter Heller, then continued as a consultant until 1968. He worked alongside Arthur Okun, Robert Solow, and Kenneth Arrow to design the Kennedy administration's Keynesian economic policy.
In 1972, Tobin and Yale colleague William Nordhaus published Is Growth Obsolete?, which introduced the Measure of Economic Welfare as the first model for economic sustainability assessment. It was designed as an alternative to GDP for measuring a society's economic well-being.