The Second Annual Howard Littlefield Award for Putting the Con in Economics Awarded to Boozer Allan Hamilton - 2

Awarded by Pig Bodine, M.Sc., Ph.D., BM2, BEM, MAD, MDMA

Biographical sketch

Boozer grew up on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, an abandoned child running with a pack of abandoned children. Living by his wits, escaping police and militia death squads alike, he somehow learned to read and speak not only Portuguese but English, French, Spanish, German and Czech.

He also showed an aptitude for mathematics. Hanging around outside the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, he asked questions of those coming and going until someone realized he was asking about flows on manifolds. Word circulated within the prestigious institution and people wondered where a street urchin would pick up such ideas. Soon young Boozer was admitted and rapidly moved beyond most of the faculty. In time he delivered seminars but was dismissed when he stole money from a family that had taken him in.

After this he disappeared for several years, resurfacing in Belo Horizonte at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). He approached Professor Borisas Cimbleris regarding his work with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in the area that has come to be called Thermoeconomics. He handed Professor Cimbleris an outline for a PhD thesis that led to his doctorate the following year.

Again Boozer disappeared, only to reappear with a series of papers revitalizing Thermoeconomics and Evolutionary Economics. This time he was offered a position at Princeton, but his predilection for hanging out at certain notorious parks and men's rooms and general street hustling cost him that job within a few years.

Of course, this didn't help him secure another position, but his mathematics and economic work continued with a series of papers, including some mathematical works in stochastic partial differential equations and random tensor algebras over Hilbert manifolds which led to further work on infinite dimensional Lie algebras. Finally, he secured a position at UEH where he ate and drank prodigious quantities and gained so much weight his street hustling days ended. It was at this time that he seems to have lost any sort of fastidious habits of personal hygiene. Besides work, his only other activity was spending time with street people. Here he picked up a taste for young women and men, usually in groups, on the opposite side of hustling. His feats of appetite have been commemorated in Haitian poetry and painting.

Eventually he fled Haiti's political breakdown, a situation he considered more dangerous than living on the streets of the favelas of Rio. The depth and scope and originality of his work brought him back to UFMG and Rio with plum positions, though he claims his real love is Haiti, an irony with Brazilian troops now part of the peacekeeping mission.

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