Education

• He was well educated in the neighborhood public schools of New York City and excelled academically early in life. Robert was good at school from the very beginning, but not very intellectual until his last year in high school. Then one of those teachers who make a difference taught him to read the great 19th century French and Russian novelists, and to take ideas seriously.
  
  Upon returning to Harvard in 1945, he chose to go on with economics. Wassily Leontief became his teacher, guide and friend. Leontief was also responsible for his introduction to empirical work: as his research assistant Solow produced the first set of capital-coefficients for the input-output model.
  
  Solow became interested in statistics and probabilistic models. He learned a lot from Frederick Mosteller, whose appointment was in the Department of Social Relations. Eventually Mosteller advised Solow to study more intensively in a place where that was possible. So, in 1949-50, he spent a fellowship year at Columbia University, in the lectures of Abraham Wald, Jacob Wolfowitz and T.W. Anderson, along with his fellow student and friend, Jack Kiefer. During that year Solow was also working on my Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory attempt to model changes in the size distribution of wage income using interacting Markoff processes for employment-unemployment and wage rates. The thesis was awarded the Wells Prize at Harvard, which offered publication in book form and $500 (in 1951 prices) upon completion.