Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen passed away today. – This news took Twitter by storm. This was because the tweet was by none other than Claudia Goldin, this year’s winner of Nobel Prize in economic sciences.
However, this turned out to be a fake news. The X account in question soon posted a message that the owner of the Twitter handle is Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian journalist. In fact, news agency PTI also sent out an alert quoting the ‘unverified’ Twitter handle. Meanwhile, Nobel laureate’s daughter Nandana Deb Sen has also dispelled the death news of her father.
“Friends, thanks for your concern but it’s fake news: Baba is totally fine. We just spent a wonderful week together w/ family in Cambridge—his hug as strong as always last night when we said bye! He is teaching 2 courses a week at Harvard, working on his gender book—busy as ever!,” Sen wrote on X.
Born on November 3, 1933 in West Bengal’s Santiniketan, Professor Sen was awarded the Nobel ‘for his contributions to welfare economics’. After completing his university studies in Kolkata, Sen also studied at Cambridge, where he received his PhD in 1959.
He has held professorships in India and at prestigious universities such as Cambridge and Oxford. He also held professorships in the US, including at Harvard University. It is said that Professor Sen’s bicycle was very crucial to his research. For his research work, Sen used to cycle through the West Bengal countryside to collect data.
Who is Tommaso Debenedetti?
An Italian, he claims to be a journalist, who has previously made hoax profiles of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and former Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “It’s so interesting for me to discover personalities that are not on Twitter and create an account,” Debenedetti was quoted as saying by The Washington Post in a 2017 interview.