Leonid Kantorovich

In 1938 he married Natalie who was a physician. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter who grew up to become economists.

He died on 7 April 1986 in Moscow. He was 74 years at the time of his death.

Leonid Kantorovich was born on 19 January 1912 at Saint Petersburg, Russia. His father, Vitaliy Moiseevich Kantorovich was a doctor and his mother’s name was Paulina Grigoryevna Zaks. His father died when he was just 10.

He had four siblings; two elder sisters, Lidiya and Nadezhda, and two elder brothers, Nikolay and Georgiy who grew up to become doctors.

In 1926, he joined the Department of Mathematics at Leningrad State University. He was only 14-year-old at the time. At the university he got the opportunity to listen to lectures by respected mathematicians Boris NikolaevichDelone, Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov and Grigorii Mickhailovich Fichtengolz.

He graduated from Leningrad University in 1930 and subsequently pursued his further studies at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, Leningrad State University. In 1934 he became a full professor.

In 1930, after completing his graduation he was appointed at the Naval Engineering School as an assistant. In the year that followed, he worked at the Research Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University as Research Associate.

In 1932 he was appointed as associate professor in the Department of Numerical Mathematics. He pursued his research in applied problems simultaneously. In 1933 He presented his first book that he co-authored with Vladimir Ivanovich Krylov. It was titled ‘Calculus of variations’.

In 1934 he participated in the Second All-Union Mathematical Congress held at Leningrad and delivered two lectures on ‘On conformal mappings of domains’ and ‘On some methods of approximate solution of partial differential equations’.

During 1934-1960 he worked at the Leningrad State University as professor. In his research of linear operations, he also defined semi-ordered linear spaces that were later to be called ‘K spaces’ or ‘Kantorovich spaces’. In this regard, he held discussions with mathematicians G. Birkhoff, J. von Neumann, M. Frechet and A.W. Tucker.

Leonid Kantorovich published ‘On one class of functional equations’ (in Russian) in 1936. In the book he assigned semi-ordered spaces to numerical methods. Though he had a mathematical background, yet he was able to understand the underlying concept of economics and thereby devise mathematical approaches.

Leonid Kantorovich was known for employing his knowledge of mathematics to solve issues and optimize processes in economics. He introduced various concepts like linear programming, functional analysis, descriptive set theory, theory of complex variables among several others.