Leonid Kantorovich quotes

Leonid Kantorovich was a Russian mathematician and economist, renowned for his pioneering work in linear programming and resource optimization. His research laid the foundation for modern mathematical economics and influenced operations research worldwide. He became the first Soviet citizen to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Here are 6 of his quotes:

In our time mathematics has penetrated into economics so solidly, widely and variously, and the chosen theme is connected with such a variety of facts and problems that it brings us to cite the words of Kozma Prutkov which are very popular in our country: "One can not embrace the unembraceable". The appropriateness of this wise sentence is not diminished by the fact that the great thinker is only a pen-name.

Leonid Kantorovich

A solution of newly appearing economic problems, and in particular those connected with the scientific-technical revolution often cannot be based on existing methods but needs new ideas and approaches. Such one is the problem of the protection of nature. The problem of economic valuation of technical innovations efficiency and rates of their spreading cannot be solved only by the long-term estimation of direct outcomes and results without accounting peculiarities of new industrial technology, its total contribution to technical progress.

Leonid Kantorovich

The accounting methods based on mathematical models, the use of computers for computations and information data processing make up only one part of the control mechanism, another part is the control structure.

Leonid Kantorovich

In planning the idea of decentralization must be connected with routines of linking plans of rather autonomous parts of the whole system. Here one can use a conditional separation of the system by means of fixing values of flows and parameters transmitted from one part to another. One can use an idea of sequential recomputation of the parameters, which was successfully developed by many authors for the scheme of Dantzig-Wolfe and for aggregative linear models.

Leonid Kantorovich

The university immediately published my pamphlet, and it was sent to fifty People's Commissariats. It was distributed only in the Soviet Union, since in the days just before the start of the World War it came out in an edition of one thousand copies in all.

Leonid Kantorovich