Leonid Kantorovich

Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was a Soviet mathematician and economist who founded the field of linear programming. He formulated its core techniques in 1939 while working on a problem of optimizing production in the Soviet plywood industry, several years before the American mathematician George Dantzig developed similar methods independently. He shared the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Tjalling Koopmans for their contributions to the theory of optimal allocation of resources. During the Second World War he applied his methods to calculate the optimal spacing of supply vehicles crossing frozen Lake Ladoga during the Siege of Leningrad, and after 1960 he directed the Department of Computational Mathematics at Novosibirsk State University.