A professor of finance at NYU, Engle is perhaps the only man to win both a Nobel Prize for Economics and finish in the top three in a national ice dancing competition.

Engle majored in physics at Williams with the intention of becoming a scientist, but switched to economics while in graduate school at Cornell. As a professor at the University of California-San Diego, he developed the Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model for asset pricing, for which he ultimately won the Nobel in 2003. Other areas of research over the years have included weak exogeneity, band spectrum regression and—everyone's favorite—autoregressive conditional duration. Although his research is incredibly dense, his economic theories have had an impact on options pricing, interest rates and currency markets, which means there are more than a few billionaire financiers flinging cash about who have Engle to thank for their riches. He's been a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business since 2000.

An all-American lacrosse player at Williams, Engle was a prize-winning ice dancer before retiring from the sport. He and his partner, OB/GYN Wendy Buchi, finished second in national competitions in 1996 and again in 1999. [Image via Getty]