The American economist Frank Hyneman Knight (1885-1972) was a leading figure in the influential Chicago school of neoclassic economics, especially in his descriptive model of the system of perfect competition.

Frank Knight was born on a farm in McClean County, Illinois, on November 7, 1885. During his boyhood he was exposed to the fire-and-brimstone evangelism of the American Midwest, which probably led to his lifelong contempt for religious dogma. He received a bachelor's degree from Milligan College in Tennessee in 1911 and bachelor's and master's degrees from Cornell University in 1916. At Cornell he studied under Allyn Young, who exerted a direct influence on Knight's economic ideas.

Knight's academic career included appointments at Cornell, Chicago, and Iowa before he returned in 1928 to Chicago, where he was subsequently appointed Morton Hull professor of economics. Throughout his academic career Knight remained primarily an intellectual. He lived in the world of ideas and thus, he...