Tjalling Koopmans

Tjalling Charles Koopmans was a Dutch American mathematician and economist, born in 's-Graveland on 28 August 1910 and died on 26 February 1985, who was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. He began at Utrecht University at seventeen specializing in mathematics, moved to theoretical physics, and studied mathematical economics under Jan Tinbergen in Amsterdam before graduating from Leiden University with a PhD in 1936 under Hendrik Kramers. He moved to the United States in 1940, worked on the economics of transportation and optimal routing, directed the Cowles Commission from 1948 and moved it to Yale University in 1955. His early work on Hartree-Fock theory is associated with Koopmans' theorem in quantum chemistry.