Robert Bishop, a respected MIT professor emeritus of economics, died Feb. 7, 2013. He was 96.
Bishop graduated from Harvard in 1937 and spent a year in Europe on a traveling fellowship. Returning to the United States in 1938, he spent a year in Princeton’s graduate department of economics before leaving without a degree and returning to Harvard, where he received a master’s degree in economics in 1942. In 1950, he earned a Harvard Ph.D.
In 1942, Bishop joined the MIT faculty. He was chair of the economics department from 1958 to 1965, and was named dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in 1964. After serving as dean into 1973, he returned to teaching and retired in 1986. He was a microeconomic theorist who examined such topics as game theory and public finance.
“If you asked me to name some of the smartest economists I’ve ever known, I would include Bishop,” said Robert Solow, one of MIT’s Nobel Prize-winning economics professors. “When Bob joined the MIT economics department it was nothing. He was integral in building the department from what was a backwater into one of the best around.”
Bishop’s wife Joan, whom he married in 1942, predeceased him in 1981.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.