Obituary: Robert Solow and Economic Modeling

was one of the most influential economists in the second half of the twentieth century.In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of economic growth.Among economists he was a popular choice.Not only had the Solow growth model become one of the main conceptual tools used in the discipline but Solow was also highly regarded for his work in other areas of economics.He exemplifies what is often considered the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) way of doing economics: using simple mathematical models tailored to the problem in hand, taking account of all available evidence.Solow also played an important role as a teacher and hence in the emergence of MIT as one of the most influential economics departments in the world.He was a very popular supervisor, always attending to the needs of students.His conscientiousness as a teacher is illustrated by his habit of discarding his lecture notes each time he delivered a course, so that the process of rewriting them every year would ensure that his teaching did not become stale.(There was one year when he kept his notes because he wanted to use them as the basis for a textbook, which was never written.)The list of his students he supervised reads like a 'Who's who' of modern economics, including, among many others, Joseph Stiglitz (growth and distribution), George Akerlof (wages and capital), William Nordhaus (technological change), Peter Diamond (optimal growth) and Martin Weitzman (indicative planning).The list is also remarkable because, from 1954 to 1997, he supervised theses on a great variety of subjects. 1If we included students who took his courses but