Gary Becker, the man who led the movement to apply economic ideas to areas of life such as marriage, discrimination and crime, died on May 3 after a long illness. He was 83.

Born in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, raised in Brooklyn and with a mathematics degree summa cum laude from Princeton, it was not until Becker arrived at the University of Chicago that he realised, “I had to begin to learn again what economics is all about”.

He had considered taking up sociology but found it “too difficult”. Yet he was to return to the questions of sociology again and again over the years, taking pleasure in wielding the rigorous yet reductive mathematical tools of economics. This approach was to win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1992 and make him one of the most influential and most cited economists of the 20th century.