Tjalling Koopmans

Tjalling Koopmans was a Dutch-American economist and mathematician who developed activity analysis and shared the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work on resource allocation.

Leonid Kantorovich: A Soviet mathematician and economist who developed linear programming methods for resource allocation and shared the 1975 economics prize. Koopmans shared the Nobel Memorial Prize with Kantorovich for contributions to resource allocation.
Linear programming: A mathematical method for optimizing a linear objective subject to linear constraints. Activity analysis formulates resource allocation as a linear optimization problem.
Transportation problem: A linear optimization problem that allocates shipments from sources to destinations at minimum cost. Koopmans studied transport allocation as a concrete case of efficient resource use.
Cowles Commission: A research institution that became a major center for mathematical economics and econometrics. Koopmans’s research and leadership at Cowles helped consolidate its role in mathematical economics.
Tjalling Koopmans Nobel lecture: Koopmans’s 1975 Nobel lecture, examining the interaction between science and economic policy. It presents Koopmans’s own account of how scientific analysis informs resource allocation.
Activity analysis: A framework that represents production as combinations of activities using inputs to produce outputs. Koopmans developed this framework to study efficient production and resource use.
Optimal allocation: The assignment of scarce resources to maximize a stated objective under specified constraints. This is the central practical problem addressed by Koopmans’s resource-allocation research.
Mathematical economics: The use of mathematical structures to formulate and analyze economic theories. Koopmans helped make optimization and formal models central tools in economic analysis.
Jacob Marschak: A Ukrainian-American economist who led the Cowles Commission and advanced mathematical economics and decision theory. Marschak directed the Cowles Commission during Koopmans’s influential years there.
Linear programming duality: A relationship linking a linear optimization problem to a corresponding problem that bounds its objective. Dual variables give scarce resources implicit values in allocation models.

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