24 | DECEMBER 10 • 2020 

P 

aul R. Milgrom’s jour-
ney to Sweden began in 
Oak Park. 
Milgrom, 72, a 1966 gradu-
ate of Oak Park High School, 
was awarded a Nobel Prize in 
Economic Sciences earlier this 
year with his Stanford adviser 
and good friend Robert B. 
Wilson.
Milgrom’s former classmates 
describe him as smart, likeable 
and one of the guys.
“
Although we didn’t have 
any classes together, I knew 
Paul from school,” said Steve 
Gilbert. “For a guy who would 
be considered an egghead, I 
remember him as laid back 
and congenial.”
Milgrom is the second of 
four sons of Abraham and 
Anne Milgrom. He has two 
adult children and a grand-
son. He has since remarried 
following a divorce. Every 
week, Milgrom hosts his son, 
a single parent, and grandson 
for Shabbat dinner at his Palo 
Alto, Calif., home.
Milgrom’s recollections of 
his Oak Park childhood are 
pretty typical of any kid grow-
ing up in the 1960s: Playing 
football, basketball and base-
ball with his friends at local 
schoolyards. Playing cards 

with friends or walking to 
services at B’nai Moshe every 
Saturday. And, of course, girls 
— girls he said he was too shy 
to date.
He recalls traveling in the 
USY on Wheels program in 
1964, “cementing my Jewish 
identity when some kids in the 
mountains [out west] threw 
rocks at our bus.”
A friendship between Joel 
Seidman and Milgrom, begun 
in kindergarten in Detroit, 
continued after their families 
moved to Oak Park on Sussex 
in 1954, just four houses apart.
They “were regular bud-
dies during these early years,” 
including attending each 
other’s bar mitzvahs, Seidman 
said, but by junior high school 
the friendship “drifted some.”
Soon it was apparent, said 
Seidman, now a physician, 
“that Paul was brilliant and 
without question my intellec-
tual superior. He spent hours 
tutoring me about chess strat-
egies and introducing me to 
game theory.”

PERHAPS THE SMARTEST
Former classmate Nolan 
Weinberg, who holds an 
M.D. from the University of 
Minnesota, said the hallways 

of Oak Park High were infused 
with the gray matter of lots of 
smart kids.
Perhaps Milgrom was the 
smartest. Weinberg recalled an 
incident when he and Milgrom 
were in a 12th grade math 
class.
The teacher brought in a 
Fortran computer program-
ming problem for the class 
to solve. “It was a tic-tac-toe 
problem, and only Paul solved 
it,” Weinberg said.
Milgrom said he doesn’t 
remember that incident but 
recalls another math class. 
“One geometry teacher could 
see that I was bored and told 
me that, so long as I got 100 
percent on every exam, I could 
skip the homework and read 
ahead in the books.”
Consequently, Milgrom said 
he finished two years of math 
in his junior year, skipped 
senior year math, and “was 
warned by the head of the 
math department that I would 
be forced to take remedial 
math in college.”
Instead, he said he became 
the first Oak Park High stu-
dent to get advance placement 
credit in calculus.
Another teacher wasn’t so 
kind, giving him “an ‘F’ when-

ever I found a clever shortcut 
that made the problem easy” 
rather than following her 
intended solution, Milgrom 
said.

ACADEMIC CAREER
After graduating from the 
University of Michigan with an 
A.B. in math, Milgrom became 
an actuary, working for two 
large actuarial firms. 
Bored, he said he decided 
to pursue graduate business at 
Stanford where he learned “the 
real reason I was bored was 
that I loved research and hated 
the grind of business routine. 
So, I switched into the career 
that, evidently, I was born for.”
That move led him to game 
theory, the study of strategic 
behavior used in economics 
fields, political science and 
computer science. 
Winning major prizes is 
nothing new to Milgrom, win-
ning, in 2012, the BBVA, an 
international award recogniz-
ing significant contributions in 
the areas of scientific research 
and cultural creation. He 
won the John J. Carty Award 
in 2018, handed out by the 
National Academy of Sciences. 
“I know I am a respected 
researcher and teacher and 
consultant, and I thought 
even a Nobel Prize could not 
change much for [me] … but 
how could it top those earlier 
prizes,” he said.
Since winning the Nobel 
Prize he said has “received 
thousands of emails, some 
from folks I had lost touch 
with. From elementary school 
and high school and college 
friends. Bridge friends. Chess 
friends. Old lovers. My opin-
ions suddenly seem to carry 
more weight.” 
 Including among his own 
family. “Even my 9-year-old 
grandson, sees me differently. 
I’m the same man that I was 
two months ago. Remarkable.” 

IN 
THED
JEWS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

The 
 Roots of 
Genius

STEVE RAPHAEL
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Brilliant Oak Park 
Brilliant Oak Park 
math student
math student
went on to earn
went on to earn
a Nobel Prize.
a Nobel Prize.

Paul Milgrom, 
winner of the 2020 
Nobel Prize in 
Economic Sciences. 

