Krugman

Krugman won the Nobel prize. I wasn't able to take his class back then as he already left. However, I read his "Pop Internationalism" was a required reading for a class, and enjoyed it a lot. Few of my friends also liked his writings and have followed his columns since then. One claimed that his column was the only article he reads on NYT.

And I just saw this through his blog:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/incidents.html
The surprising part is that he put Asimov's Foundation series as the reason that he got interested in economics - as an approximation of pyschohistory!

I did take the classes by Acemoglu and Athey. Both of them won the Bates Medal, and maybe they will get this one some days too :)