Susan Hockfield Paul Samuelson Memorial Kresge Auditorium April 10, 2010

Good morning. Mrs. Samuelson and members of the Samuelson family, distinguished guests and friends. Others here today can speak with greater authority about Paul Samuelson’s role as the “father of modern economics.” And others who knew him longer can speak to his qualities as a colleague, a father, a teacher and a friend. So I will touch on just a few aspects of his impact on MIT, and on American higher education more broadly. When Paul Samuelson arrived here in 1940, roughly a year before Pearl Harbor, MIT was a very different place: Smaller. Narrower. And not yet transfigured by its service in World War II and the subsequent revolution in federal research funding. At the time, the main duty of the Department of Economics was to supply teachers for the two economics courses that were required of every undergraduate – and that were universally loathed. Over the next two decades, both the Department and MIT would be transformed, with enormous contributions from Paul. Paul’s arrival put MIT economics on the map. Within a year, he helped launch MIT’s first graduate program in economics, and his intellectual magnetism helped attract a cadre of future Nobel Laureates, including Bob Solow, the late Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, several of whom have joined us today. In less than 20 years, Paul helped transform a slightly dowdy “service” department into an intellectual mecca of economics. And his warmth, wit and humility shaped the collaborative culture that became the Department’s signature. MIT hired Paul before he had completed his Ph.D. Just seven years later, he achieved what some have called his “annus mirabilis.” In 1947-48, he earned the rank of full professor at MIT; he won the John Bates Clark Medal in the first year it was awarded; he published his masterwork, Foundations of Economic Analysis; he also published Economics: An Introductory Analysis, the best-selling elementary economics textbook of all time, now having sold more than 4 million copies, in more than 40 languages; and – with the arrival of triplets – he became a father of six. He was 32 years old. The honors, of course, continued. I will call out only a few of the most significant: In 1966 he ascended to the rank of Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty distinction. 1970 brought the Nobel Prize for Economics, only the second

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ever awarded, and the first bestowed on an American. In 1991, MIT honored him with the establishment of the Paul A. Samuelson Chair in Economics, and in 1996 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. In an important sense, Paul transformed his department with his own stature and character. Yet he achieved that stature -- and transformed his field -- in a way that I think of as quintessentially MIT: He entered a discipline that was imprecise, largely descriptive and a bit fuzzy, and he used the tools of mathematics to make it rigorous, predictive and clear. What’s more, in his twin commitment to both the research and the teaching of economics, he embodied an MIT ideal. I want to close with one of Paul’s contributions that, although less well known, reshaped the history of this and other research institutions, and of the nation itself. Paul shared this vignette from his early years at the Institute in an interview in 2007, made in preparation for MIT’s upcoming 150th anniversary. Late in 1941, as the United States plunged into World War II, Paul was quickly drawn into MIT’s all-absorbing war effort, through the legendary Rad Lab. “At the Radiation Laboratory,” he explained, ”I didn't work as an economist at all. I worked as a mathematician, on automatic fire control. And it was the first time in my life I wasn't one of the two smartest guys in the room.” In 1945, as his Rad Lab research was winding down, Paul was recruited to work on what, in retrospect, may be the single most important white paper in the history of American higher education and innovation: “Science: The Endless Frontier.” A few months earlier, FDR had asked Vannevar Bush -- Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and previously MIT’s Vice President and Dean of Engineering -- for a plan to sustain the exceptional scientific momentum established during the war. As Paul told the story, he and two other colleagues (they called themselves the “Three Moles”) became the plan’s central draftsmen. Their paper boldly framed the vast scientific creativity unleashed by federal funding of wartime science as a peacetime model for building the nation’s future. As we know now, this framework transformed life and commerce in the 20th century. It sent us to the Moon and beyond, spawned entirely new industries, revolutionized communications, reinvented the work place, and drove successive waves of American growth and prosperity. Yet because the plan insisted that funding be based on scientific merit, it had its enemies. As Paul explained, “There was a strong political element that wanted

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to give every county in the United States its pro rated share of the science budget. Which would be about the stupidest arrangement possible.” We should all be grateful that wiser arrangements prevailed, and we can thank Paul and his fellow draftsmen for deftly establishing the principle of peer review that, quite simply, has driven excellence in American science ever since. Paul Samuelson transformed everything he touched: the theoretical foundations of his field, the teaching of economics at MIT and around the world, the ethos and stature of his department, and the lives of his colleagues and students. And in everything he did, he represented the very best of MIT.