“My mind is ever toying with economic ideas and relationships. Great novelists and poets have reported occasional abandonment by their muse. The well runs dry, permanently or on occasion. Mine has been a better luck. As I have written elsewhere, there is a vast inventory of topics and problems floating in the back of my mind. More perhaps than I shall ever have occasion to write up for publication. A result that I notice in statistical mechanics may someday help resolve a problem in finance.”

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s

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Paul A. Samuelson 47
American economist 1915–2009

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