Tjalling Koopmans
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Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was the joint winner, with Leonid Kantorovich, of the 1975 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Koopmans was born in 's-Graveland in the Netherlands. He began his university education at the University of Utrecht, aged 17, specialising in mathematics. 3 years later, in 1930, he switched to theoretical physics. In 1933, he met Jan Tinbergen, the 1969 Bank of Sweden prize winner, and moved to Amsterdam to study mathematical economics under him. In addition to mathematical economics, Koopmans extended his explorations to econometrics and statistics.
Koopmans moved to the United States in 1940. There he worked for a while for a government body in Washington D.C., where he published on the economics of transportation focusing on optimal routing, then moved to Chicago where he joined a research body affiliated with the University of Chicago. In 1946, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1955, he moved to Yale University where he continued to publish, now on the economics of optimal growth and activity analysis.
Koopmans' early works on the Hartree-Fock theory are associated to the Koopmans' theorem, which is very well known in quantum chemistry. Koopmans was awarded his Prize (jointly with Leonid Kantorovich) for his contributions to the field of resource allocation, specifically the theory of optimal use of resources. The work for which the prize was awarded focused on activity analysis, the study of interactions between the inputs and outputs of production, and their relationship to economic efficiency and prices.
Koopmans' cousin Simon van der Meer won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984.
External links
- [Nobel autobiography]
- [Obituary] - Boston Globe
- [Tjalling Charles Koopmans nació en Gravelinas, Holanda.]
- [Biographical memoir] by Herbert Scarf
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