Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich
Mathematician Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was born on January 19, 1912 in Russia. He studied mathematics at the Leningrad State University, and received his doctorate in mathematics in 1930 at the age of eighteen. After completing his studies, he became a professor of mathematics at Leningrad from 1934 to 1960. He led the department of mathematics and economics in the Siberian branch of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1971 and then served as head of the research laboratory at Moscow’s Institute of National Economic Planning 1971 to 1976. He was selected to the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1964 and was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1965. In 1975, he won the Nobel Prize for economics along with Tjalling Koopmans for their work on the optimal allocation of scarce resources.
Kantorovich used his mathematical skills in economics. He realized that the problem of maximizing the distribution of raw materials could be solved in mathematical terms. He developed a technique known as “linear programming.” In the book The Mathematical Method of Production Planning and Organization published in 1939, Kantorovich showed that all problems of economic allocation can be reduced to maximizing a function subject to constraints. Kantorovich introduced many new concepts into the study of mathematical programming such as giving necessary and sufficient optimality conditions on the base of supporting hyper planes at the solution point in the production space, the concept of primal-dual methods, the interpretation in economics of multipliers, and the
