In Memoriam: Professor Tapan Mitra

• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Makoto Yano,Kazuo Nishimura
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijet.12231
• Date: 01 September 2019

doi: 10.1111/ijet.12231

In Memoriam: Professor Tapan Mitra

Kazuo Nishimura

*

and Makoto Yano

†

It is with a deep sense of sadness that we announce that Professor Tapan Mitra passed away on 3

February 2019. He was 70 years old. Tapan was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics at

Cornell University, having previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the

State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was one of the leading economic theorists of his

generation, always working on fundamental problems and using his exceptional analytical power

to find definitive answers.

Tapan served as a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Economic

Theory (IJET) from its inception in 2005. He made enormous contributions to IJET to build up its

high standard, and IJET published a special issue on growth, sustainability and equilibria in his

honor in 2010.

Those who know Tapan's work will remember his high standards of scholarship and profound

impact on economic theory. We will deeply miss the distinguished mathematical economist Tapan

Mitra.

International Journal of Economic Theory 15 (2019) 229 © 2019 IAET 229

*

Professor Tapan Mitra was three years senior to me at the graduate school of the University of Rochester. Later we

started to work jointly and met almost every year either in Ithaca or Kyoto. I remember as if it were yesterday how we

discussed optimal growth problems at the McKenzie Library at Kyoto University. I greatly miss my dear friend, a

distinguished scholar and a wonderful co‐author.

†

I met Professor Tapan Mitra for the first time at Cornell University in 1981, right after Tapan and I joined the

economics department as a professor and a new assistant professor, respectively. From then we worked on many

common issues; I have long admired his deep insight into economic theory. I will always be grateful for the kind help

that I received from him.