Born in 1883 in Triesch, Bohemia (today’s Trest, Czech Republic), Joseph Alois Schumpeter went on to become one of the leading economists of the twentieth century. Schumpeter studied law and economics at the University of Vienna from 1901 to 1906 under teachers like Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Schumpeter assumed a professorship in Czernowitz in Galicia in 1909 that he left for a position at the University of Graz in 1911. In 1913–1914 he spent a year as a visiting professor at Columbia University, New York. After the First World War, Schumpeter briefly served as a member of the Socialization Commission of the German socialist government and as Austrian Minister of Finance. From 1921 to 1924 he worked for a Viennese private bank but returned to academia in 1925 when he assumed a professorship at the University of Bonn in Germany. The years in Bonn were overshadowed by the deaths of Schumpeter’s mother, his wife, and newborn son in the summer of 1926. Having spent two terms as a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1927 and 1930 Schumpeter moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for good in 1932. During his 18 years at Harvard, Schumpeter worked with scholars such as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and John Kenneth Galbraith thus directly influencing the discipline and practice of economics well beyond his death. Schumpeter died in Taconic, Connecticut, in 1950.