January 19: The Only Soviet Economics Nobelist

Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet economist to win the Nobel Prize (in 1975), was born in St. Petersburg on this date in 1912. In 1939, while working for the Soviet government, he was given the task of optimizing production in the plywood industry and developed the mathematical technique of linear programming, which he would apply during the post-Stalin years to central problems of Soviet economics such as planning, pricing, rent valuations, the allocation of resources, and the decentralization of decisions. During World War II, Kantorovich was in charge of safety on the “Road of Life,” the ice road that crossed Lake Ladoga and provided the only access to the besieged city of Leningrad. He calculated the optimal safe distance between cars on ice, depending on its thickness of ice and the temperature of the air, and twice walked across the lake alongside the cars to guide them safely across, a feat for which he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War. In the 1970s he became prominent in developing the application of computers to the economy. “In the middle of the 1950s, the interest in the improvement of economic control in the USSR increased significantly, and conditions for studies in the use of mathematical methods and computers for general problems of economics and planning became more favorable.” --Leonid Kantarovich