Short answers, pulled from the story.
Paul Samuelson won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970, becoming the first American to receive it. The Swedish Royal Academies cited him for doing more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory and for rewriting considerable parts of economic theory.
Samuelson's textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948, became the best-selling economics textbook of all time before 1988. It sold more than 300,000 copies of each edition between 1961 and 1976, was translated into forty-one languages, and had sold over four million copies as of 2018.
Foundations of Economic Analysis, published in 1946, is Samuelson's magnum opus derived from his doctoral dissertation. It formalized the principles of maximizing behavior and stable equilibrium as the two foundations of economic theory, and made the technique of comparative statics rigorously precise. It was inspired by classical thermodynamic methods.
Samuelson moved to MIT as an assistant professor in 1940 because of anti-Semitism at Harvard. In a 1989 letter to Henry Rosovsky, he blamed the situation above all on Harold Burbank, the Harvard economics department chair, and named Edward Chamberlin, John H. Williams, John D. Black, and Leonard Crum as contributors.
Samuelson argued that free markets do not stabilise themselves and that zero regulating is vastly suboptimal to rational regulating. He dismissed libertarianism as its own worst enemy and criticized Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek by name for their opposition to state intervention.
Paul Samuelson was born on the 15th of May, 1915, in Gary, Indiana. He died on the 13th of December, 2009, after a brief illness, at the age of 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.