Important personalitiesBack

Amartya Kumar Sen, (born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and a Nobel laureate. He has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998.

He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at 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. Sen is a member of the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the not-for-profit behind the Health Impact Fund. He is the first Indian and the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. He also serves as the first Chancellor of the proposed Nalanda International University.

Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages over a period of forty years. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian Heroes" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world". New Statesman listed him in their 2010 edition of "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.