Paul Samuelson memorial
Last updated
On 13 December, 2009 around 5 pm at Logan Airport as I was getting ready to cross over to Paris after the NBER Africa conference, I notice several missed calls on my mobile and I call back to learn from Sofia Santos, a journalist at TSF radio station, that Paul Samuelson had just died and that she wanted a comment. I gave her the comment, mentioning the honorary degree from Nova when it came to the relevance for Portuguese economists. The broadcast stresses his role in building MIT as the best economics department in the world and the fact he called me grandson because I had been a student of students of his Carlos Diaz Alejando and Pentti Kouri. The text includes a statement by my colleague Luís Cunha, no doubt another grandson since he was a student of Jagdish Bhagwati and Ronald Findlay. http://tsf.sapo.pt/paginainicial/audioevideo.aspx?content_id=1446709
On the next day Helena Garrido, herself a graduate from Nova, interviewed me on the same subject, together with Silva Lopes and Miguel Beleza (scanned here, plus another piece mostly following Paul Krugman’s eulogy).
On the TVI program of 16 December, Joaquim Pina Moura, António Peres Metelo and I built on these.
It was also mentioned at the elections of the Lisbon Academy of Science and the dean of FEUNL sent condoleances
after a vote to that effect of the senior faculty at the meeting of the science
council of 18 December. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/paul-samuelson-rip/?emc=eta1