- Person
- Leonid Kantorovich
- Lived
- 1912–1986
- Field
- Mathematical economics
- From
- Soviet
The story
After the Siege of Leningrad was lifted, Leonid Kantorovich returned to the city in 1944. Alongside his university post he headed the Department of Approximate Methods at the Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He had long worked on approximate methods for solving equations, and he now became interested in computation itself, with results in automating programming and in building computers.
In the late 1940s, working with the mathematicians Mark Gavurin and Vera Faddeeva, Kantorovich found ways to get far more out of primitive punched-card tabulating machines. The key was to run many similar calculations side by side, so that simple changes to the program could be made by hand on the machine's plugboard. They devised fast ways of looking up values in tables and a method of computing products using only addition on the tabulator, with one of the factors expressed in binary rather than decimal.
A major achievement was the calculation of tables of Bessel functions, used throughout physics and engineering, up to the 120th order over a large interval. The team split the range of integration into several intervals and computed functions of different orders on each interval at the same time, creating large numbers of identical operations that the machines could handle efficiently.
Computers were later built on the basis of Kantorovich's suggestions, and historians of Soviet computing note the significance of his concept of large-block organisation of computing processes and its influence on the architecture of computer systems. In the 1980s, looking back over his career, Kantorovich listed hardware and software as one of the nine distinct areas to which he had contributed.
The principle he applied, dividing a large problem into many identical pieces and working on them simultaneously, is the same idea that drives parallel computing today, from supercomputers to the graphics processors used in modern science and artificial intelligence.
Why it matters
Kantorovich's early insight into parallel calculation anticipated a principle at the heart of today's fastest computers.
About Leonid Kantorovich
Leningrad mathematician who invented linear programming in 1939 while solving a plywood factory’s puzzle, and the only Soviet economist to win the Nobel Prize, in 1975.
More about Leonid Kantorovich
- Leonid Kantorovich showed why rational prices matterKantorovich's book The Best Use of Economic Resources, drafted during the war and published in 1959, linked efficient planning to a rational system of prices.
- Leonid Kantorovich linked pure maths to practical computingLeonid Kantorovich's paper Functional Analysis and Applied Mathematics showed how abstract mathematics could power numerical methods, earning a State Prize in 1949.
- Leonid Kantorovich reshaped the mathematics of transportLeonid Kantorovich's work on the transportation problem gave mathematics the Monge-Kantorovich problem and the Kantorovich-Rubinstein metric.
- Leonid Kantorovich invented linear programming in 1939Asked in 1938 to help a Leningrad plywood trust get more from its machines, Leonid Kantorovich devised the method now known as linear programming.
- Leonid Kantorovich's methods cut waste in steel sheetsFrom 1948 to 1950, work guided by Leonid Kantorovich at the Leningrad Carriage-Building Works used linear programming to cut steel sheets with less waste.
- Leonid Kantorovich trained a new kind of economistIn Novosibirsk from 1960, Leonid Kantorovich built a laboratory and school that trained a generation of mathematician-economists.
- Leonid Kantorovich kept the Road of Life trucks on the iceDuring the Siege of Leningrad, Leonid Kantorovich calculated safe spacing for supply trucks crossing frozen Lake Ladoga on the Road of Life.
Sources
- Leonid Vital'evich Kantorovich MacTutor, University of St Andrews
- Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich: Biographical NobelPrize.org
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