- Person
- Leonid Kantorovich
- Lived
- 1912–1986
- Field
- Mathematical economics
- From
- Soviet
The story
In September 1941 German forces captured Shlisselburg on the shore of Lake Ladoga and cut every land route into Leningrad. The besieged city was cut off, and food was running out. The only way in during winter was across the frozen lake. From November 1941 supplies were carried over the ice, first by horse-drawn sleighs and then by convoys of trucks, along what became known as the Road of Life.
The ice was dangerous. If vehicles were too heavy or too close together, it could crack beneath them and send them to the bottom of the lake. The route also operated under German artillery fire and air attack.
Leonid Kantorovich, then a professor at the Navy's higher engineering school in Leningrad, worked on the safety of the route. He calculated the best distance between vehicles depending on the thickness of the ice and the air temperature. In December 1941 and January 1942 he walked out onto the ice himself, moving between the trucks to make sure they kept the spacing that would stop them from sinking.
Many trucks carrying food were still destroyed by German air raids, but the ice road kept the city alive. By late December 1941 the ice was about a metre thick, and on 23 December the amount delivered exceeded the city's daily consumption for the first time. Deliveries allowed a series of increases in the starvation rations from the end of December, and by February 1942 civilians in Leningrad received rations comparable to those elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Over the course of the siege more than 1.3 million people, mostly women and children, were evacuated across the roads.
For his feat and courage Kantorovich was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War and the medal For the Defence of Leningrad. The Road of Life is now a World Heritage Site, and Kantorovich's calculations remain a striking example of how mathematics helped save lives.
Why it matters
Kantorovich's calculations helped food reach a starving city, showing how mathematics could save lives under the most extreme conditions.
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 pioneered parallel computing ideasIn the late 1940s Leonid Kantorovich organised parallel calculations on punched-card machines and proposed computer designs based on large-block processing.
- 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.
Sources
- Leonid Kantorovich Wikipedia
- Road of Life Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.