Google honours Sir Arthur Lewis

ANYONE performing a Google search on Thursday would have been greeted by a “Google doodle” of a balding, bespectacled black man, which when clicked on turned out to be Caribbean economist and Nobel Prize winner, the late Sir Arthur Lewis.

Google explained its honouring of St Lucia-born Sir Arthur, and this was picked up by United Kingdom newspaper, The Independent, and United States newspaper, USA Today.

A story in USA Today was titled, Google pays tribute to economist and pioneer Sir W Arthur Lewis.

The Independent ran a story on how the famed economist broke down barriers.

This newspaper said, “Google is honouring celebrated economist and professor Sir W Arthur Lewis with a doodle 41 years from the day he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.”

He earned a government scholarship to study at the London School of Economics eventually earning a doctorate in industrial economics to become the LSE’s first black faculty member.

By 33, Lewis was a full professor at the University of Manchester and later got a full professorship at Princeton University.

His research and publications helped to model the economics of developing countries, with him advising governments in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and being knighted in 1963. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his research in economics. He died in 1991 and is buried on the grounds of Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St Lucia, an institute named after him.

Sir Arthur is also honoured at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, by the name of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES.)