Such a bare-bones sketch of Bob Tollison's scholarly life and times hardly does justice to a man who had a major impact on the direction of the literatures of public choice and applied microeconomic theory more broadly, supervised the doctoral dissertations of scores of graduate students, taught principles of economics and public choice to countless undergraduates and published several hundred peer-reviewed journal articles plus many books and monographs. Neither does it allow people either inside or outside the ivory tower's walls who did not know him personally to grasp Bob's astonishing intellectual energy, his work habits, his generosity, the friendships he forged with colleagues and coauthors, or the important influences he had on the academic careers of many other scholars. It is for those reasons that I contacted and received commitments from 14 of Bob's closest friends and most frequent coauthors soon after news of his passing reached me by telephone and email on that black Monday morning last October, asking them to contribute personal remembrances of him, to summarize some of the research projects on which they had collaborated or that they found to be especially noteworthy, or simply to write about their interactions with Bob on campus, at professional conferences, in governmental posts, or other venues. I have written two such essays myself (Shughart 2017a, b), but Bob was such a giant in the economics profession-a proverbial force of nature-that I alone could not possibly comprehend-or even know about-all of the ways in which he affected other lives and career trajectories.
