No economist alive is unmarked by the work of Paul Anthony Samuelson, who died yesterday at the age of 94. Tributes were flowing in last night to the man who did more than any other theorist to turn economics from a scattered selection of insights into a social science.

He was born on May 15 1915 in Gary, Indiana, but later claimed “truly” to have been born on January 2 1932, at his first economics course as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he received a rigorous mathematical grounding in classical economics from Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and other prewar Chicago giants. He moved to Harvard immediately on graduation in 1936, his arrival coinciding with the momentous publication of Keynes' General Theory.

Soon after receiving his doctorate, he joined the economics faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He remained there for the rest of his life, being made one of 12 MIT Institute professors in 1966.