Professor Kenneth J. Arrow was born in New York City in 1921, graduated from the City College of New York in 1940, served in the United States Air Force as a weather officer from 1942 to 1946, and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 1951. His appointments include Research Associate at the Cowles Commission (now Foundation) in Economic Research (1947-9) during an extraordinary period, with such colleagues as Jacob Marschak, Tjalling Koopmans, Leonid Hurwicz, Lawrence Klein, and Franco Modigliani, faculty positions at the University of Chicago, Stanford University (most of his career), and Harvard University, and long-time consultant at the RAND Corporation.

His has published work on a variety of topics in economics and some outside. The latter include studies of the optimal use of wind forecasts for flight planning and of the foundations of sequential analysis of statistical data. The former include work on social choice, the use of securities for risk-bearing, general equilibrium theory, the economics of information, with special reference to asymmetric information, inventories, economic growth and its measurement, medical economics, and the economics of innovation.

Together with John R. Hicks, Professor Arrow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972 "for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory". He has also received a number of honors, including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association, and the von Neuman Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, as well as 25 honorary degrees. He has also been president of a number of learned societies and member of several honorary societies.

Among his students have been John Harsanyi, A. Michael Spence, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson, who have later been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences