Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen gives Olin Foundation Lecture April 19

The lecture is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. A limited number are available at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office, the Graduate School dean's office, 350 Caldwell Hall, and at The Bookery, in the DeWitt Mall in downtown Ithaca.

Sen, one of the world's most influential intellectuals , is an expert on world poverty who has written extensively on famine. Awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to welfare economics, he is a master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, and a former professor in the economics department at Harvard University. His 1998 Nobel citation praised him for restoring "an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems." Indian President K.R. Narayanan has described Sen's work as bringing "a compassion for the ordinary human and a vision of an egalitarian world" to the science of economics.

Born in India, Sen's life work was sparked by the Bengal famine of 1943 when he was a boy of 10. Since receiving his doctorate from Trinity College in 1959, he has taught at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, the London School of Economics and at Harvard. He also has served as president of the International Economic Association and Development Studies Association, among others, and as editorial board member for such varied journals as Feminist Economics, The Indian Journal of Quantitative Economics, and Economics and Philosophy.

Sen's research has ranged over a number of fields in economics and philosophy, including social choice theory, welfare economics, theory of measurement, development economics and moral and political philosophy. In 1972, he co-authored a famous UN guideline for development project evaluation which has proven invaluable for many organizations. He has a forthcoming book, Freedom, Rationality and Social Choice, and he currently is working on the rationality of choice and behavior and also on objectivity of knowledge.

Sen is a fellow of the British Academy of the Econometric Society as well as a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the awards he has received are: the "Bharat Ratna," the highest honor awarded by the president of India; the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics, the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award, the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, and the Nobel Prize.

The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation established an endowment to fund the Olin Lecture Series in 1986.