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Biography

Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, on May 15, 1915, to Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and Ella née Lipton. His family, he later said, was "made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel-town when my family went there". In 1923, Samuelson moved to Chicago where he graduated from Hyde Park High School (now Hyde Park Career Academy).

Samuelson attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935. He said he was born as an economist at 8:00 am on January 2, 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom. The lecture mentioned as the cause was on the British economist Thomas Malthus, who most famously studied population growth and its effects. Samuelson felt there was a dissonance between neoclassical economics and the way the system seemed to behave; he said Henry Simons and Frank Knight were a big influence on him. He next completed his Master of Arts degree in 1936, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1941 at Harvard University. He won the David A. Wells prize in 1941 for writing the best doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in economics, for a thesis titled "Foundations of Analytical Economics", which later turned into Foundations of Economic Analysis. As a graduate student at Harvard, Samuelson studied economics under Joseph Schumpeter, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler, and the "American Keynes" Alvin Hansen.

Samuelson moved to MIT as an assistant professor in 1940 and remained there until his death. Samuelson's biographer argues that a central reason for Samuelson's move from Harvard to MIT was the anti-Semitism that was famously widespread at Harvard at the time. In a 1989 letter to his friend Henry Rosovsky, Samuelson blamed anti-Semitism in Harvard economics above all on chair Harold Burbank, as well as on Edward Chamberlin, John H. Williams, John D. Black, and Leonard Crum.

Samuelson's family included many well-known economists, including brother Robert Summers, sister-in-law Anita Summers, brother-in-law Kenneth Arrow and nephew Larry Summers.

During his seven decades as an economist, Samuelson's professional positions included: