The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998 — for work on social-choice theory, welfare economics, and the moral foundations of how societies measure their own well-being. Behind that citation sits a six-decade project: that famines are caused by entitlements, not by absent food; that development is not a matter of incomes alone but of what people can actually do and become; that the choice between equality and growth is a false binary, and that economics without philosophy is a discipline that has lost its argument with itself. Born in Santiniketan in 1933 (and christened, by Rabindranath Tagore, with the name 'Amartya'). Presidency College, Trinity College Cambridge, then chairs at Delhi, the LSE, Oxford, Harvard. Development as Freedom and The Idea of Justice remain in print on every serious reading list. The diaspora's most cited public intellectual, by some distance.