Kenneth Joseph Arrow (born August 23, 1921) is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to receive this award, at 51. In economics, he is considered as one of the founders of modern (i.e. post-World War II) neo-classical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. Ken Arrow’s impact on the economics profession has been tremendous. For more than fifty years he has been one of the most listened to of all practicing economists. His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably “Arrow’s impossibility theorem”, and his work on general equilibrium analysis. He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information.
Bernard Osher, a patron of education and the arts, is well known as “the quiet philanthropist.” He created the Bernard Osher Foundation in 1977 which seeks to improve quality of life through support for higher education and the arts. The Foundation provides postsecondary scholarship funding to colleges and universities across the nation. The Foundation also supports selected centers in integrative medicine at Harvard University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In addition, the Foundation supports a growing national network of lifelong learning institutes for older adults. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes, operating on the campuses of 115 colleges and universities from Maine to Hawaii, have a National Resource Center at the University of Southern Maine. A local grants program provides support for arts and humanities institutions in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and the State of Maine.
A native of Biddeford, Maine and a graduate of Bowdoin College, Osher has pursued a successful career in business, beginning with the management of his family’s hardware and plumbing supplies store in Maine and continuing with work at Oppenheimer & Company in New York before moving to California. There he became a founding director of World Savings, the second largest savings institution in the United States, which was recently merged with Wachovia Corporation.
A collector of American paintings of the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, Osher purchased the fine art auction house of Butterfield & Butterfield in 1970 and oversaw its growth to become the fourth largest auction house in the world. In 1999, he sold the company to eBay.
Having served on a number of philanthropic and non-profit boards, Osher is an active community leader in the San Francisco Bay Area, the recipient of several honorary degrees, a serious student of opera, and an ardent fly fisherman.
He and his wife Barbro Osher, Consul General for Sweden in San Francisco, conduct their philanthropy through the Bernard Osher Foundation, the Bernard Osher Jewish Philanthropies Fund, and the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, which supports Swedish cultural and educational projects in North America and Sweden.
Reed E. Hundt (born March 3, 1948 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) was chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. He oversaw the introduction of spectrum auctions designed in part by Auctionomics chairman Paul Milgrom, and led the implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that reduced substantially the rates for international telecommunications service.
Hundt has worked as an advisor to McKinsey & Company and to the Blackstone Group. He also is on the boards of several other technology companies, including Intel Corp. He also serves on the board of Data Domain and Infinera, as well as privately held firms. He serves as co-chair for The Coalition for Green Bank, working toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the American energy industry.
Hundt also played a role in crafting one of the largest single national commitments to K-12 education, the Snowe-Rockefeller program that directs more than $4 billion annually to connect all classrooms to the Internet.
Hundt has authored two books: In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship (2006) and You Say You Want A Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics (2000).