Who

A professor of finance at NYU, Engle is perhaps the only man to win both a Nobel Prize for Economics and finish in the top three in a national ice dancing competition.

Backstory

Engle majored in physics at Williams with the intention of becoming a scientist, but switched to economics while in graduate school at Cornell. As a professor at the University of California-San Diego, he developed the Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model for asset pricing, for which he ultimately won the Nobel in 2003. Other areas of research over the years have included weak exogeneity, band spectrum regression and—everyone's favorite—autoregressive conditional duration. Although his research is incredibly dense, his economic theories have had an impact on options pricing, interest rates and currency markets, which means there are more than a few billionaire financiers flinging cash about who have Engle to thank for their riches. He's been a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business since 2000.

On the side

An all-American lacrosse player at Williams, Engle was a prize-winning ice dancer before recently retiring from the sport. He and his partner, OB/GYN Wendy Buchi, finished second in national competitions in 1996 and again in 1999.

Personal

His wife, Marianne Engle, is a child psychologist at NYU. He has two twenty-something children: daughter Lindsey is a developmental psychologist and son Jordan is an aspiring actor. Engle was a professor at UCSD for over twenty-five years, and he and his wife still have a house in San Diego. Their main residence is in Mahopac in Putnam County.

For the record

Former treasury secretary and current Harvard president Lawrence Summers was a student of Engle's at MIT.