LEONID KANTOROVICH, 1975 WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS;
AT 74
Author: Associated Press
Date: Sunday, April 13, 1986
Page: 79
Section: OBITUARY
MOSCOW -- Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician who won the 1975 Nobel
memorial prize for economic research, died at 74 Monday after what officials
said was a long illness. He had worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in
Novosibirsk.
An official at the academy said Mr. Kantorovich was buried yesterday at
Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Mr. Kantorovich was considered the father of Soviet econometrics -- the
application of mathematics and statistics to economic problems -- but was slow
to receive recognition at home and internationally.
He won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1975, the
same year Soviet physicist Andrei A. Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize
after years of dissident activities and campaigning for human rights and
disarmament.
The economics prize was established in 1968 by the Central Bank of Sweden
in Nobel's memory. Mr. Kantorovich shared the 1975 prize with Dutch-born
Tjalling Koopmans, an American professor at Yale University.
Mr. Kantorovich's first work on econometrics was published in 1939, but
was not used immediately because the field had evolved in the United States
and was not held in high regard by the Soviets.
During World War II, the Soviet Union began applying mathematics to
economic planning for the military. The science was researched intensively
after the war largely because of Mr. Kantorovich and like-minded colleagues.
He advocated partial decentralization of the rigidly planned Soviet economy,
an approach now pushed by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
In 1965, Mr. Kantorovich was awarded the Lenin Prize, the highest prize of
the Soviet Union, for developing linear programming methods.
When he received the Nobel award, the official Soviet news agency Tass
asked him why the Nobel committee, set up in a capitalist country, would honor
the work of a researcher in a socialist economy.
He replied that his work was applicable to the economy "of any
economically developed country," but stressed that mathematics "must be
considered most valuable and most appropriate for the socialist system of
economy, where scientific planning plays an immeasurably greater role."
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