Sen has written that he has always found it difficult to avoid touching on several different fields in his research.

“I feel somewhat apologetic that my interests are so diverse,” Sen told The Crimson in 2000. “I’m so peripatetic, after a year or two I tend to move to something else.”

But most colleagues contend that it’s precisely this uninhibited approach to scholarship that has made Sen one of the most important thinkers of his time.

WELFARE AND BEYOND

Sen was born in the university town of Dhaka, India to an academic family: His father was a chemistry professor and his grandfather had taught Sanskrit. Sen has written that he knew early in his life that he, too, would become an academic. The only open question was what he would teach.

He received a relatively unorthodox education early in his life, when his parents sent him to a progressive elementary school in Dhaka.

“Any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged,” he wrote in an autobiographical statement upon receiving the Nobel Prize. The teachers instead emphasized the importance of genuine curiosity as the impetus behind education and, ultimately, creative thought. Under this eccentric tutelage, Sen considered careers in physics, mathematics and Sanskrit before deciding to pursue economics.

Sen’s early education was also rather unusual for the time in its embrace of a globalizing world, drawing curricular material from the thought and culture of several non-western nations.

This global awareness has since become the heart of his research. As an undergraduate at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, Sen found himself in a vibrant and highly politicized intellectual environment that, he has suggested, informed his later research interests.

At Presidency College Sen first became interested in welfare economics and democratic social choice. He continued to pursue these interests when, after receiving his degree in economics and mathematics while still in his late teens, he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, to take another bachelor’s degree—and eventually a doctorate—in economics alone.

But when his dissertation snagged a no-strings-attached fellowship, Sen gained a few years of open-ended study at Cambridge. He turned to philosophy, focusing in particular on epistemology and moral and ethical topics. At Harvard, he has taught extensively in both the economics and philosophy departments.

Sen taught at the Delhi School of Economics from 1963 through 1971, when he undertook several important projects in social choice theory—a branch of economics that addressed group decision-making by voters with different personal priorities.

In the early 1970s Sen returned to England, teaching first at the London School of Economics and then at Oxford, where he tackled broad problems pertaining to poverty and economic inequity, focusing in particular on the causes of famine.

Throughout his career, Sen has gained special attention for his broadly based and unconventional interpretations of various economic phenomena. His unconventional interpretation of the 1974 floods in Bangladesh, for instance, garnered him particular acclaim.

Sen ran against conventional economic wisdom to suggest that the floods were not the sole cause of famines that ensued. Rather, he suggested, longstanding socioeconomic weakness among local farmers, due to insufficient support from the government, was also to blame.