Leonid Kantorovich trained a new kind of economist

Person: Leonid Kantorovich
Lived: 1912–1986
Field: Mathematical economics
From: Soviet

The story

By the late 1950s Leonid Kantorovich's mathematical approach to economics was winning recognition in the Soviet Union. His book The Best Use of Economic Resources appeared in 1959, and a special conference of the Academy of Sciences approved the new scientific direction. The field attracted talented young scientists, and universities in Leningrad, Moscow and other cities began preparing what he called hybrid specialists: people trained as both mathematicians and economists.

The newly created Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences offered especially favourable conditions. Its science city of Akademgorodok, founded in 1957 near Novosibirsk on the shore of the Ob Sea, was built as a centre for research and education, home to Novosibirsk State University and dozens of institutes. A special laboratory on applying mathematics to economics was set up there, headed by V. S. Nemchinov and Kantorovich, and integrated into the Institute of Mathematics as a department.

Kantorovich was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 1958 and moved to Novosibirsk in 1960. He created and led the Department of Computational Mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, and from 1961 to 1971 he held the chair of mathematics and economics in the Siberian Branch. In 1964 he was elected a full member of the Academy, and in 1965 he received the Lenin Prize, which he regarded as a sign that the new direction had won recognition from both scientists and government.

He later recalled that many talented mathematicians and economists emerged from his Novosibirsk group. His own two children also became mathematical economists. From 1971 he headed a research laboratory in Moscow at the Institute of National Economic Planning, where senior executives were introduced to new methods of management, and he advised various government bodies.

Colleagues later described him as the founder of an original economic school, and that school spread modern optimisation and economic modelling through a generation of scientists and planners.

Why it matters

The school Kantorovich founded spread modern optimisation and economic modelling through a generation of scientists and planners.

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.

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Leonid Kantorovich

1912–1986 · Mathematical economics

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