Family and Education
Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, into a Jewish family, the son of two economists, Robert Summers and Anita Summers of (Romanian-Jewish ancestry), who are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of Robert Summers, who, following an older brother's example, changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (Anita Summers's brother). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.
At age 16, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally intended to study physics but soon switched to economics (S.B., 1975). He was also an active member of the MIT debating team. He attended Harvard University as a graduate student (Ph.D., 1982). In 1983, at age 28, Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. It was also during this time that Summers was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He underwent treatment and has since remained cancer free. He was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987. Summers has three children (older twin daughters Ruth and Pamela and son Harry) with his first wife, Victoria Perry. In December 2005, Summers married English professor Elisa New, who has three daughters (Yael, Orli and Maya) from a previous marriage. He currently owns two houses, one in Washington, D.C. and one in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Read more about this topic: Lawrence Summers
Famous quotes containing the words family and, family and/or education:
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“It is turning three hundred years
On our cisatlantic shore
For family after family name.
We’ll make it three hundred more”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)