Olaf Storbeck from Düsseldorf, Deutschland · CC BY-SA 2.0

Robert Solow built the Solow–Swan model, the framework economists still use to explain long-run economic growth, showing that capital accumulation alone couldn't account for it and that technological progress had to be doing most of the work. The insight won him the 1987 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961. Four of his doctoral students at MIT went on to win Nobel Memorial Prizes of their own.