Kenneth Joseph Arrow was born on August 23, 1921, in New York City to Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents: his mother Lilian (Greenberg) from Iași, Romania, and his father Harry Arrow from nearby Podu Iloaiei. Raised in New York City amid financial hardships during the Great Depression, the family supported his education, leading him to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University to live at home. He earned his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1940 and received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia in 1951, with studies in statistics and economics.

Arrow's distinguished career spanned academia, including a long tenure at Stanford University, where he contributed foundational work in economics. He is renowned as a Nobel laureate for his pioneering research in social choice theory—most notably his impossibility theorem, which demonstrates the limitations of aggregating individual preferences into coherent social choices—and general equilibrium analysis, developed alongside collaborators like Gérard Debreu, highlighting the efficiency of competitive markets under certain conditions. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1957 for his contributions to economic theory. Beyond economics, Arrow was recognized as a mathematician, statistician, political scientist, and writer, profoundly influencing fields like welfare economics and public policy.

Arrow passed away on February 21, 2017, leaving a legacy as one of the 20th century's most influential economists.