◀ ▲ ▶History / 20th-century / Person: Kantorovich, Leonid Vitalyevich

Person: Kantorovich, Leonid Vitalyevich

Leonid Kantorovich was a Soviet mathematician and economist who can be regarded as the founder of linear programming.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• The two lectures that made the greatest impression on Kantorovich were the opening address by Otto Yulyevich Schmidt on "The role of mathematics in construction of socialism" and Sergei Natanovich Bernstein's deep and wide-ranging address "State of the art and problems of the theory of approximations of functions of one real variable by polynomials".
• Kantorovich spoke on 25 June in the session on 'Theory of functions and theory of series' chaired by Dmitrii Evgenevich Menshov.
• Kantorovich gave two lectures, "On conformal mappings of domains" and "On some methods of approximate solution of partial differential equations".
• Could Professor Kantorovich tell them where they had gone wrong?
• Kantorovich's background was entirely in mathematics but he showed a considerable feel for the underlying economics to which he applied the mathematical techniques.
• Kantorovich introduced many new concepts into the study of mathematical programming such as giving necessary and sufficient optimality conditions on the base of supporting hyperplanes at the solution point in the production space, the concept of primal-dual methods, the interpretation in economics of multipliers, and the column-generation method used in linear programming.
• In this work Kantorovich applies optimisation techniques to a wide range of problems in economics.
• This was moved from Leningrad to Yaroslavl, 300 km north of Moscow and Kantorovich was evacuated there.
• Kantorovich was a joint winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for economics.
• Professor Kantorovich is today the leading representative of the mathematics school in Soviet economic research.
• In a number of publications, one being his book, 'The Best Use of Economic Resources', Professor Kantorovich has analysed similar efficiency conditions for an economy as a whole, and there, particularly demonstrated the connection between the allocation of resources and the price system, both at a certain point in time and in a growing economy.
• Although Kantorovich is most famous for applications of mathematical methods, particularly mathematical programming, to economics, however, as we have seen, he also worked in many other areas of mathematics.
• We note the significance of the concept, put forth by Kantorovich, of the large-block organisation of computing processes and the influence of this concept on the development of the architecture of computer systems.
• It seems clear that Leonid Kantorovich is a mathematician to the core.
• The uniqueness of Kantorovich is precisely in that he is at the same time an outstanding economist, a scientist who changed fundamentally the understanding of economic events, the whole economic thinking, and became the founder of an original economic school.
• It is interesting to note that, in the 1980s, Kantorovich suggested that his contributions might be divided into the following nine distinct areas: (1) descriptive function theory and set theory; (2) constructive function theory; (3) approximate methods of analysis; (4) functional analysis; (5) functional analysis and applied mathematics; (6) linear programming; (7) hardware and software; (8) optimal planning and optimal prices; and (9) the economic problems of a planned economy.
• Kantorovich's introvertness, obvious in personal communications, was inexplicably accompanied by outright public extravertness.
• The freedom of Kantorovich can hardly bewilder anyone as stemming from his essence, the gift of mathematics.
• Kantorovich received a great many honours for his remarkable contributions, the most prestigious being the Nobel prize which we have already mentions.

Born 19 January 1912, St Petersburg, Russia. Died 7 April 1986, Moscow, USSR.

View full biography at MacTutor

Tags relevant for this person:

Origin Russia, Prize Nobel

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

Github:

non-Github:

@J-J-O'Connor

@E-F-Robertson

References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive