The Abhijit Banerjee I knew, and the geometry problem he gave me

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize for their work in fighting poverty.

The problem of writing about Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee for me is finding a suitable starting point. I know him as long as I can remember, and surely much before that also, because of the very strong closeness of our families. His is a family of academics. Abhijit’s, like his father's, forte was mathematics. I remember in 1979 he gave me a problem in geometry to solve: Prove this — if the bisectors of two angles in a triangle are equal, the triangle is isosceles. He said it took him a few days to crack it.

It is by chance that