Frederic Mishkin, who’s been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he’s standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a casual conversation, he’s a blur of motion, his hands waving, pointing, jabbing the air. “I talk with my hands,” he says. “I always have.” When he was in graduate school, in fact, one of his professors was so exasperated by this constant gesticulating that he made the young economist sit on his hands whenever he visited the professor’s office.
