Leonid Vital’evich Kantorovich

Saul I. Gass () and Jonathan Rosenhead
Additional contact information
Saul I. Gass: University of Maryland
Jonathan Rosenhead: London School of Economics

Chapter 10 in Profiles in Operations Research, 2011, pp 157-170 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Leonid Kantorovich was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding mathematicians who applied his immense talents to the study of economic problems of industry and national economic systems and, thus, helped to change not only the field of mathematical economics, but also the economic planning system of the USSR. His initial economic research started with the analysis of industrial production problems, which led him to state and resolve basic problems in linear programming (LP) in 1939, before such structures were studied in the West. He recognized the applicability of his work to a wide range of industrial and transportation problems; he also generalized his ideas to show how the USSR could improve its allocation of resources. This work was not looked at kindly by the Soviet government and academic economists. Conducted under very trying conditions, his research was often maligned, causing him to stop his efforts in the early 1940s. Leonid’s seminal work was unknown to the West, especially to those in the U.S. who independently developed LP from 1947 and established it as a major analytical tool for business, industry, and government. When, in the late 1950s, the situation within the USSR changed and the importance of Leonid’s work was recognized, his ideas led to a new school of Soviet economics that drew upon his mathematical economic theories.

Keywords: Transportation Problem; USSR Academy; Mathematical Economic; Operational Research Society; Silver Medal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:isochp:978-1-4419-6281-2_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9781441962812

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-6281-2_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Series in Operations Research & Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().