Curated category
Columbia University faculty
- Emi NakamuraEmi Nakamura's grandfather, Guy Orcutt, was an economist. Her parents, Alice Nakamura and Masao Nakamura, were economists too.
- Al GoreAl Gore won more votes than his opponent on Election Day 2000, yet still lost the presidency. That outcome, decided by a Supreme Court ruling of 5-4 in Bush…
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Lee Thorndike built one of the most influential theories in the history of psychology by watching cats try to escape from wooden boxes.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated…
- Béla BartókBéla Bartók died in a New York City hospital on the 26th of September 1945, and only ten people attended his funeral. For a man later ranked among Hungary's…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to…
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society.
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day.
- John A. GarratyJohn Arthur Garraty was born on the 4th of July, 1920, a date that would seem almost too on-the-nose for a man who spent his career writing American history.
- Thích Nhất HạnhThich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao on the 11th of October 1926, in the ancient capital of Hue in central Vietnam. He died there too, on the 22nd of…
- Charles A. BeardCharles Austin Beard was born on the 27th of November 1874 in Knightstown, Indiana, and by the time he died in 1948, he had become the most controversial…
- Lynn ThorndikeLynn Thorndike coined a phrase that historians still use every day, and he did it almost in passing. In A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926…
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Alois Schumpeter was born on the 8th of February, 1883, in Triesch, a small town in Habsburg Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic.
- Alfred EinsteinAlfred Einstein was born in Munich on the 30th of December 1880, and he would spend his life navigating two worlds: the careful, evidence-bound discipline of…
- Franco ModiglianiFranco Modigliani was born on the 18th of June 1918 in Rome, into a Jewish family headed by a pediatrician father. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in…
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done…
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical…
- Allan NevinsAllan Nevins grew up on a farm in Camp Point, Illinois, the son of a stern Presbyterian farmer of Scottish descent and a German-heritage mother named Emma.
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades…
- James S. ShapiroJames S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period.
- D. T. SuzukiD. T. Suzuki was born Teitarō Suzuki in Honda-machi, Kanazawa, the fourth son of a physician, and he would spend the better part of a century dismantling the…
- Eric FonerEric Foner, born on the 7th of February 1943 in New York City, is the historian that college professors reach for most often.
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later…
- Nicholas Murray ButlerNicholas Murray Butler ran Columbia University for 43 years, the longest presidency in that institution's history. He won the Nobel Peace Prize.
- Oskar HaleckiOskar Halecki was born in Vienna on the 26th of May 1891, the son of a Polish officer serving in the Austrian Army. His father, Oscar Chalecki-Halecki, rose…
- Lorenzo Da PonteLorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano on the 10th of March 1749, the Jewish eldest son of a widower in Ceneda, a small town in the Republic of Venice.
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his…