Amartya Sen Biography 
Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher who got Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1998. He showed interest in the problems of the poorest members of the society. He worked on the causes of famine and developed practical solutions for preventing shortages of food. He is working as the professor of Thomas W. Lamont University and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University.
He was born on 3rd November 1933 in a Bengali Hindu family in Santiniketan, West Bengal. His parents are Ashutosh Sen and Amita Sen. His father was a Chemistry professor at Dhaka University. His maternal grandfather Acharya Kshiti Mohan Sen was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore and uncle of Sukumar Sen, the first Chief Election Commissioner of India. His brothers Amiya Sen is a well known doctor and Barrister Ashoke Kumar Sen is former Union Cabinet Minster.
Amartya Sen did his schooling at St Gregory’s School in Dhaka and Visva Bharathi University School and Presidency College at Kolkata. He got first class in B. A. Honors and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He completed his Tripos examination and enrolled for Ph. D in Economics and became a professor at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. After two years he completed his Ph. D in 1959.
He married Nabaneeta Dev Sen who was an Indian writer and scholar. He has two children, Antara and Nandana. As this marriage broke up, he married Eva Colorni and has two children Indrani and Kabir. His second wife died from stomach cancer and he again married Emma Georgina Rothschild. Sen loves to go on long bike rides and likes to spend his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan.
He became a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1961. He taught economics at University of Calcutta and Delhi School of Economics. In 1972 he joined London School of Economics as a professor. Later he taught at University of Oxford and Nuffield College. He was appointed as the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and in 2004 he returned back to Harvard. He developed the theory of social choice. He published his book, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. His books are translated into many languages.
Sen is an atheist and holds that this can be associated with one of the atheist schools in Hinduism, the Lokayata. In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:
"In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is “Atheism”—a very strong presentation of the argument in favor of atheism and materialism".
Published: N/A
Updated: June 12, 2018
