Leonid Kantorovich

Origins and early life

Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was born on 19 January 1912 in Saint Petersburg, into a Jewish family; his father was a doctor practising in the city. He entered Leningrad State University at fourteen, graduated in mathematics and mechanics in 1930, was a full professor at twenty-two and held a doctorate at twenty-three.

Work and career

The turn that made his name came from a mundane request: in 1938 a plywood trust asked him how to set its machines so as to waste the least veneer. He saw that the question was general — a quantity to be maximised under a set of linear constraints — and that a systematic method existed for solving it, which he set out in 1939 in The Mathematical Method of Production Planning and Organization, some years before George Dantzig arrived at the same technique in the United States and gave it the name linear programming.

Recognition

During the siege of Leningrad he taught at the naval engineering academy and worked on the Road of Life across the ice of Lake Ladoga, computing the spacing between lorries as a function of ice thickness and air temperature, and walking the ice himself between the moving trucks in the winter of 1941–42; he was decorated for it. He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1949, assigned to the Soviet atomic project in 1948, and from 1960 built and led the computational mathematics department at Novosibirsk.

He also left deep results in pure mathematics — Kantorovich spaces in the theory of vector lattices, the convergence theorem for Newton's method, and the optimal transport metric that carries his name and is now standard in probability. He shared the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Tjalling Koopmans, the only Soviet economist ever to receive it, and died on 7 April 1986.