Peter Diamond’s doctoral students designed this t-shirt for his 70th birthday in 2010. It bears his name, DIAMOND, and his department, MIT ECON. The typeface is the same as the one used by the Boston Red Sox baseball team, of which Diamond has been a loyal fan since 1949. Like many American boys, he buried himself in statistics about players and games, and this required a lot of mental arithmetic. Especially thanks to the baseball statistician Bill James’s analyses, Diamond’s sports interest gave him a lot of experience and knowledge of statistical connections and how to draw conclusions from available data.
For his 70th birthday, his wife arranged for him to perform the ceremonial first pitch at a Boston Red Sox game. Many doctoral students and teachers at MIT were present, wearing the t-shirt that had been specially-designed for Diamond. When it was announced later that year that Diamond would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, many of his colleagues put on the same t-shirt.
Peter Diamond donated the T-shirt to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2010.
