Frank H. Knight graduated from UT in 1913 with both a BS degree and a master’s degree. He studied economics under future UT president James D. Hoskins and was elected to Phi Kappa Phi. He then went to Cornell, where he received the PhD in 1916. His dissertation, “Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit,” was widely quoted and highly regarded. In it he made the distinction between risk (randomness with knowable probabilities) and uncertainty (randomness with unknowable probabilities), set forth the role of the entrepreneur in the context of his theory of profit, and provided one of the earliest discussions of the law of variable proportions in the theory of production.
Knight served on the faculties of Cornell and the University of Iowa before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he and Jacob Viner led the Department of Economics from the 1920s to the late 1940s. In 1950 Knight was elected president of the American Economic Association, and in 1957 the association awarded him the Francis Walker Medal for lifetime achievement in economics, an award given only once every five years and discontinued when the Nobel Prize in economics was established.
He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received honorary doctorates from Princeton, Northwestern, Columbia, Rochester, Illinois, and the University of Glasgow. He was inducted into the Alumni Academic Hall of Fame in 1994.