January 19, 1912
В Petersburg A child prodigy was born – a future mathematician and economist, one of the creators of linear programming Leonid Kantorovich. The only Soviet scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
It is the duty and right of a scientist to tell the truth.
I was seven when I started "borrowing" my older brother's university math textbooks. He thought he was playing, but it turned out he was solving problems. There's even a story about him taking Lenya with him to exams (they said he had no one to leave the baby with at home) so he could discreetly help his classmates with their answers.
He was nine when he discovered a new way to extract the square root of a number. His teachers interceded, and a commission under the Council of People's Commissars allocated his family extra rations, which was very helpful during the Civil War. At fourteen, he entered university, studying mechanics and mathematics at Leningrad State University.
I saw him and couldn't understand what this little boy was doing at the University... I remember how shocked we all were when, less than a year later, his first works appeared in print. The idea that a student could get published seemed fantastic to us.
(Solomon Mikhlin)
By the age of 18, upon graduating from university, he was the author of 11 scientific papers devoted to the descriptive theory of functions and sets (published in the USSR and abroad).
At 22, he became a professor at Leningrad State University. At 23, he received a doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences without defending a dissertation.
Kantorovich lectured in a strange way: he'd begin a sentence quietly, then suddenly increase in volume. But… at the end of the semester, the student would be surprised to find excellent notes in his notebook—one that made studying and passing exams very easy.
(Joseph Romanovsky)
He stood at the origins of the Soviet mathematical school of functional analysis: he studied the theory of functionals and operators in Banach spaces, and developed the axiomatics of semi-ordered spaces known as K-spaces (“Kantorovich spaces”).
In 1938, he received first prize at the All-Union Competition for Young Scientists for a series of works on functional analysis (there were no higher awards in the country at the time).
In 1939, engineers from a plywood trust approached him. Plywood was needed in both construction and aircraft manufacturing, and they asked him to calculate the optimal use of different types of machine tools processing different types of wood. The task seemed impossible—it required solving 5 billion systems of linear equations with 12 unknowns. Kantorovich found a solution by modifying the method of resolving Lagrange multipliers.
Productivity increased by 5% without additional costs, and the idea developed formed the basis for future linear programming. Today, it is widely used in solving economic problems. Back then, "Economic Calculation of the Best Use of Resources" was met with hostility—the method contradicted Marx's labor theory of value. The monograph was published only in 1959.
I did the same thing in the US Tjalling Koopmans He discovered the method later, in 1942, but coined the term "linear programming." He would share the Nobel Prize with Kantorovich in 1975 "for their contributions to the theory of optimal resource allocation."
Optimization was introduced into the Soviet economy with some difficulty. For example, in 1949, after implementing know-how and increasing metal usage in cutting by 4%, a railcar plant nearly lost its bonus: it failed to meet its scrap metal waste plan. They were also required to improve their performance by 4% the following year.
It turned out that the metal had to be used at 101%, and I even had to write a paper from the academy that more than 100% was not possible.
From 1960 to 1971 he lived in Novosibirsk — was among the scientists of the first call of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
I came up with a way to improve the taxi service: drivers were often idle, refusing to take short-distance orders. I suggested charging a pickup fee but reducing the mileage rate.
He died in 1986, at 74. His last interview was published under the title “Looking at the Truth with Open Eyes.”
People were brought up (and still are!) to believe that a plan is everything. If you fulfill a plan, you're a hero, but if you fall short by even one percent, you're a slacker. <> Our economic culture has declined not because of a low level of scientific knowledge, but because of a lack of ethics.
