A biographical sketch of

Walter Erwin Diewert began life in the winter of 1941 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He completed a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in mathematics in 1964, both at the University of British Columbia. He completed a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. He is currently a full professor at the University of British Columbia, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1970. His parents had both fled the Ukraine, and had met in Canada. His father managed to establish himself as a building contractor and his mother as a seamstress. But it is far from certain that Erwin would have gone to college were it not for the relatively affordable University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As a UBC student, Erwin bagged peas and worked in a plywood mill to earn his tuition. Erwin is an economist with feelings and opinions about labour unions that are rooted in personal experience: he was a union guy, having found he could earn substantially more in union jobs. It was not until his third year at UBC when he was awarded a small merit scholarship that he was finally able to devote full time to his studies, and began to think he might go on to graduate school. Erwin is an economic theorist whose research, from his graduate student days on, has been empirically motivated. His career has been a personal quest to develop tools for economic modeling and econometrics that meet the needs of applied analysis for real world economics problems. His real world concerns are rooted in ongoing and deepening involvement with empirical researchers, with government agencies, and with private sector and public enterprises. In addition to the publications in economics journals for which he has become so well known, he has produced a substantial body of consulting-related reports (including the report to the New Zealand Business Roundtable on which his contribution to this special issue, with his former Ph.D. student Denis A. Lawrence, is based). The problems tackled in these reports have been posed by government officials, officials at international organizations like the World Bank, and practitioners and analysts in railway, power and telecommunications companies. Erwin's four main areas of research are: (1) flexible functional forms, (2) the implications of maximizing behaviour, (3) welfare economics and applied general equilibrium modeling, and (4) index numbers. We attempt to sketch out the evolution of his work in each of these main areas, all of which involve duality theory in some way.