As a Nobel Prize winner and a recipient of the Bharat Ratna, Amartya Sen is today a well know name. But did you know that the man who actually named him Amartya was another Nobel Laureate? In a post shared on social media this afternoon, the Nobel Prize organisation revealed an interesting fact about the economist's life, writing that he was given his "unusual" first name by Literature Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
"Imagine being named by Literature Laureate Rabindranath Tagore - that is exactly what happened to Amartya Sen," the Nobel Prize organisation wrote. They wrote that it was Rabindranath Tagore - the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 - who suggested the name "Amartya" to his mother.
Amartya Sen's mother was the daughter of scholar Kshitimohan Sen, who was a close associate of Tagore's. "Tagore suggested Sen's unusual first name to his mother. 'Amartya' means immortal," the organisation explained.
This was not the only connection between the two Nobel Laureates - Amartya Sen also attended Tagore's experimental school at Santiniketan in present-day West Bengal.
"Sen was awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 'for his contributions to welfare economics'. 85 years earlier Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature," the Nobel Prize organisation wrote while sharing a photograph of Mr Sen at his home in Cambridge, UK. The picture shows Mr Sen, 86, standing in front of two photographs of Rabindranath Tagore and his grandfather Kshitimohan Sen with Mahatma Gandhi in 1941.
Last month, the organisation had shared the story of Amartya Sen's bicycle - the vehicle that helped him on his journey to win the Nobel. They revealed that Mr Sen travelled around the countryside on his bicycle for the research work that won him the prestigious prize in 1998.
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