Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who played a key role in the intellectual resurgence of capitalism and the global shift to free-market economics in the final third of the 20th century, died today at a San Francisco hospital. He was 94. The cause of death was heart failure. A Boston Globe article recalled how at a 90th-birthday tribute, the columnist George F. Will described Dr. Friedman as “the most consequential public intellectual of the 20th century.” Few rivaled Dr. Friedman, a self-described “classical liberal,” in the 19th-century sense, in shaping the intellectual climate of the 21st century. Milton Friedman was a great man who contributed immensely to humanity. He will always be one of my intellectual heroes. Here is a biography.