Leonid Kantorovich

Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was a Soviet mathematician and economist, born on 19 January 1912, who is regarded as the founder of linear programming. Born to a Russian Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, he studied at Leningrad State University, graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics in 1930 and became a full professor at the age of 22. He devised the technique now known as linear programming in 1939 while optimizing production in a plywood industry, and in functional analysis he formulated results on normed vector lattices now called Kantorovich spaces, together with the Kantorovich inequalities on the convergence of the gradient method and of Newton's method. He also proposed the Kantorovich-Rubinstein metric used in probability theory. After 1960 he worked in Novosibirsk, and he won the Stalin Prize in 1949 and shared the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Tjalling Koopmans.