The impact of Kenneth Arrow's work on twentieth century economics has been to change fundamentally economists' understanding of their discipline and their view of several major classes of problems. Arrow was a leader in the post-World War II push to bring the full power of mathematics and statistics to bear on economic analysis. The fields of general equilibrium, social choice and welfare economics, mathematical programming, and economics of uncertainty have been fundamentally altered by his contributions. In addition, Arrow is a man of wide learning, refreshing spontaneity, personal warmth, and remarkable absence of pretension.

Born in 1921 to Harry and Lillian Arrow of New York City, Kenneth Arrow was raised in and around New York. He pursued his undergraduate studies at City College of New York. On graduation from CCNY in 1940, he was awarded the Gold Pell Medal for highest grades in the graduating class. He studied then at Columbia, in particular with Harold Hotelling, and received an M.A. in mathematics in 1941.

Arrow's studies were interrupted by World War II. He served with the Weather Division of the Army Air Force and there wrote his first scientific paper (“On the use of winds in flight planning”). However, his other professional activities in the division almost prevented this line of research. The new young group of statisticians in the Weather Division subjected the prevailing prediction techniques to statistical test against a simple null hypothesis based on historical averages for the date in question.