Leonid Hurwicz

Origins and early life

Leonid Hurwicz was born in Moscow on 21 August 1917, between the two revolutions of that year, and early in 1919 the family went home to Warsaw, where his father, a lawyer with a degree from the Sorbonne, had grown up. His family were Polish Jews, and at nine Leo started at a private school attended and staffed mostly by Jews.

Work and career

At Warsaw University, when a group tried to force Jewish students into segregated seats, he and the others stood at the back of the lecture hall for a whole year in protest, and the next year they were seated again. He took his law degree there in 1938, left that autumn for the London School of Economics on his father's advice, and reached Switzerland in August 1939, less than a week before Germany invaded Poland. His parents and younger brother fled east, only to be arrested and sent to a labour camp in Arctic Russia, while he crossed Spain to Lisbon and sailed for America in 1940 on the Greek ship Nea Hellas.

He never took a degree in economics: he audited classes in Chicago, assisted Paul Samuelson at MIT in 1941, taught statistics to Army and Navy recruits in meteorology during the war, and married Evelyn Jensen in July 1944. In 1951 he joined the University of Minnesota, his home for the rest of his life, and from the 1960s built mechanism design, the study of how to write the rules of an economic game knowing that the players will pursue their own interest and may try to cheat.

Recognition

He received the National Medal of Science in 1990, and in 2007 shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, a third each, “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”, at ninety the oldest laureate there had yet been.

Later years

Too frail to travel to Stockholm, he received it from the Swedish ambassador at his university's Ted Mann Concert Hall on 10 December 2007, and he died in Minneapolis on 24 June 2008.