Curated playlist
University of Chicago faculty
- Kevin M. MurphyKevin Miles Murphy holds a title that very few economists ever earn: the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. That name alone signals a lineage. But Murphy's reputation…
- Muzaffar AlamMuzaffar Alam was born on the 3rd of February 1947, the same year India gained independence and the Mughal world he would spend his career studying had already been gone for nearly a century. He grew up to hold the George V. Bobrinskoy…
- Robert Lucas Jr.Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was born on the 15th of September 1937 in Yakima, Washington, the eldest child of a family that ran an ice creamery. When that business collapsed during the Great Depression, the family moved to Seattle, and Lucas…
- Roger EbertRoger Ebert typed his last blog post two days before he died on the 4th of April 2013, signing off with words that could have come from any of his 46 years of reviews: "I'll see you at the movies." He had spent his final months writing…
- 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 the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop…
- Kenneth PomeranzKenneth Pomeranz asked a question that historians had been avoiding for centuries: why did industrialization happen in Europe, and not in China? In the year 2000, Princeton University Press published his answer in a book called The Great…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. That detail says…
- Friedrich HayekFriedrich Hayek wrote on the 26th of October 1929, three days before the Wall Street crash, that there was no reason to expect a sudden collapse of the New York stock exchange. Decades later, the Nobel committee would praise him as one of…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- Jan GondaJan Gonda was born in Gouda on the 14th of April 1905, and by the time he died in Utrecht on the 28th of July 1991, he had spent sixty years publishing scholarly articles on Indian Sanskrit and Indonesian Javanese texts. He never set foot…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Marshall HodgsonMarshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson died on the 10th of June, 1968, while jogging on the campus of the University of Chicago. He was 46. At the time of his death, his most important work had never been published. The three-volume manuscript he…
- 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 something that few economists ever manage: he had changed the questions his field…
- Ronald CoaseRonald Harry Coase was born on the 29th of December 1910 in Willesden, a suburb of London, and he would live to the age of 102 - long enough to see ideas he developed in the 1930s and 1960s reshape how lawyers, economists, and policymakers…
- 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 technique so fundamental that it now bears his name. The question at the heart of…
- Richard ThalerRichard H. Thaler walked onto the set of a Hollywood film in 2015 and, alongside pop star Selena Gomez, explained to moviegoers why people make terrible financial decisions. The film was The Big Short, a dramatization of the credit and…
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell was born on the 18th of May 1872 in a country house called Ravenscroft, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent liberal families of the British aristocracy. He would live for 97 years, bridging the…
- James Samuel ColemanJames Samuel Coleman walked into a whites-only amusement park outside of Baltimore with his wife, their three children, and a Black family. He was arrested, along with roughly 300 other demonstrators. This was not a sideshow in his life.…
- Charles RosenCharles Welles Rosen was born on the 5th of May, 1927, in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant architect and a semiprofessional actress who also played piano. He began musical studies at age four. By age six he was enrolled…