Lester G. Telser
Lester Greenspan Telser was an American economist and Professor Emeritus in Economics at the University of Chicago.
Education and career
He was a native of the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago and a graduate of the Chicago Public Schools and Roosevelt University, where he studied under Abba Lerner. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956, with Milton Friedman as his principal thesis supervisor. He taught briefly at Iowa State University and was conscripted into the United States Army in which he served from 1956 to 1958. He was a member of the University of Chicago faculty from 1958. He was a visitor at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University in 1964–1965 and at the Center for Operations Research in Econometrics at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain in 1969–1970.Contributions
His works include research on the theory of the core, Federal Reserve policy, and integer programming. Unusually for the Chicago school of economics, he also wrote about game theory as early as 1972.A brief, personal history by Telser of the University of Chicago Economics Department including the importance of the Cowles Foundation is available as part of a symposium on "Living the Legacy: Chicago Economics through the Years." The University of California-Berkeley also created an oral history of modern economics and included an interview with Lester Telser.