Leonid Hurwicz was the oldest person to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences when awarded in 2007.
Hurwicz was 90 when he received the prize, making him the oldest economics laureate at the time and the oldest person to receive any Nobel Prize. He shared the 2007 economics award with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for mechanism design theory.
Mechanism design studies how rules can be created to achieve desired outcomes when participants possess private information and may have competing interests. It is often described as working backward from a goal to design an institution or game that encourages suitable behavior.
Hurwicz’s career connected economics, mathematics, and systems analysis. The record is distinct from the separate question of who was the youngest economics laureate: Esther Duflo was 46 when she won in 2019. Hurwicz died in 2008, less than a year after receiving the prize.