Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen was born on 3rd November 1933 in Dhaka which is the capital of Bangladesh now. He is an Indian philosopher and also a renowned economist. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions in welfare economics and social choice theory. he is a person who wants to solve problems related to famine and poverty. He has helped in creating the UNDP index. In 2012 he was the first non-american to win the National Humanities Medal.

He is currently a professor in the Thomas W. Lamont University and also a professor of economics and philosophy at the Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, distinguished fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from 1998 to 2004. He is the Advisory Board of the global health, behind the health impact fund. He was the first Indian, in fact the first Asian academic to be the head of Oxbridge College. He was also the first chancellor of the Nalanda International University.

He has written numerous book which have been translated into 60 different languages. He was also listed in the Times Magazine under the "60 years of Asian Heroes." and also in New Statesman under "World's 50 most influential people who matter.". Sen was one of the 20 Nobel Laureates who signed the "Stockholm Memorandum" at the third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden on 18 May 2011. Sen is also the jury chair for the infosys prize.

In India Sen studied at the Visva-Bharati University school and then at the Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First Class First in his B.A. (Honours) in Economics as a graduating student of the University of Calcutta, and emerged as the most eminent student of the well known batch of 1953. Subsequently, in the same year, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he earned a First Class (Starred First) BA (Honours) in 1956. He was elected as the President of the Cambridge Majlis in the same year. While still an undergraduate student of Trinity, he met Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis, who was much impressed with Sen, returned to Calcutta and immediately recommended the brilliant Cambridge undergraduate to Triguna Sen, the then Education Minister of West Bengal, who had been instrumental in turning the National Council into the new Jadavpur University.

After Amartya Sen completed his Phd in economics from Trinity College he returned to India on a two year leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him as Professor and the founder Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, which was his very first appointment, at the age of 23. This still remains the youngest age at which anybody has been appointed to a professorship or a head of departmentship in India. During his tenure at Jadavpur University, Sen had economic methodologist A. K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching at the renowned Benares Hindu University, as his supervisor. After two full years of full-time teaching in Jadavpur, Sen returned to Cambridge to complete his Ph.D. in 1959.

In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen's work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the formulation of the Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme. This annual publication that ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators owes much to the contributions by Sen among other social choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and inequality. He wrote a controversial article in The New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (see Missing women of Asia), analyzing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia. Other studies, such as one by Emily Oster, have argued that this is an overestimation, though Oster has recanted some of her conclusions.