Gary Becker was an American economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992. Described as “the most important social scientist in the past 50 years” by the ‘New York Times’, he was also the recipient of the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was one of the first economists to extend the tenets of microeconomic analysis to a wider range of human issues like family organization, drug addiction, racial discrimination, crime, etc. He was also one of the main exponents of the study of human capital. Born to a Jewish family in Pennsylvania, he was an athletic boy who was more interested in sports than in intellectual pursuits up to his mid-teens. He was a good student nonetheless, and ultimately when he had to choose between sports and academic activities, he went for academics. Having loved mathematics from an early age, he also became deeply interested in economics and sociology as a young man. He attended Princeton University and eventually earned his PhD from the University of Chicago, before embarking on an academic career. Known for extending the scope of economic research to sociological issues, he was credited with the "rotten kid theorem." His economic analysis of democracy is also quite famous.