Michael Fogel · CC BY-SA 3.0

An economic historian who pioneered cliometrics — applying rigorous statistical method to questions historians had previously answered by narrative alone, including a famously contrarian reassessment of the economics of American slavery. His broader work quantifying how nutrition, health, and technology shaped economic growth over centuries won him the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Douglass North. He spent much of his career at the University of Chicago.