Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich | Biography

Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was a Soviet mathematician who is considered notable not only for his contributions to mathematics, but to economics, as well. Kantorovich developed and applied mathematical problems to the area of economic planning. His work, which was sometimes considered to be controversial, was so influential that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1975.

Kantorovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on January 19, 1912. It became evident early in his life that he was mathematically gifted. He was widely recognized as a brilliant mathematician by the time he received a doctorate in mathematics from Leningrad State University in 1930, when he was 18 years old. He was named a professor there in 1934, and remained in that position until 1960.

Although he was trained only in mathematics, Kantorovich had a keen interest in, and profound understanding of economics. His work in both fields has been widely recognized, and, in 1961 he was named the head of the department of mathematics and economics in the Siberian branch of the United Socialist Soviet Republic Academy of Sciences. He was honored in 1964 when he was named to the highly regarded Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and he received the prestigious Lenin Prize in 1965. In 1971, Kantorovich became the director of research at the Institute of National Economic Planning in Moscow, a position he held for five years.

While serving as director at the Institute of National Economic Planning, Kantorovich received the 1975 Nobel Prize for economics for his work on the optimal allocation of scarce resources. He shared the prize with Tjalling C. Koopmans, a Dutch-born economist who was teaching at Yale University. Kantorovich and Koopmans used the mathematical technique of linear programming as a tool in economic planning.

Linear programming, for which Kantorovich pioneered a model in 1939, is a specific class of mathematical problems, and has various applications. It was developed as a discipline in the 1940s as a means of solving difficult planning problems in wartime operations. Kantorovich and Koopmans applied the technique to economic planning, ultimately showing that prices of goods should be based on the relative scarcity of resources.

Although Kantorovich was highly regarded as a mathematician and economist, his views, which were sometimes critical of the Soviet economic policy, often were in conflict with those of his colleagues. He was considered to be a reform economist, with ideas that frequently ran contrary to traditional Marxist thinking.

Kantorovich's best-known work is The Best Use of Economic Resources, which he wrote in 1959. He also wrote Functional Analysis in 1977. He died in the Soviet Union on April 7, 1986, at the age of 74.