Robert Ayres

Robert Underwood Ayres (born June 29, 1932, passed on October 23, 2023 at the hospital of Nemours, France) was an American-born physicist and economist. His career focused on the application of physical ideas, especially the laws of thermodynamics, to economics; a long-standing pioneering interest in material flows and transformations (industrial ecology or industrial metabolism)—a concept which he originated. His most recent work challenged the widely held economic theory of growth.