Prof. Leonid Kantorovich of the Soviet Union who was named yesterday as the joint winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in economics, is Jewish, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry informed the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today. The NCSJ said it obtained information from an authoritative source that the 63-year-old Nobel Laureate’s parents were Jewish and that he is Jewish, though nonobservant.
Prof. Kantorovich is associated with the Institute Matematiki in Novosibirsk, is a professor at Leningrad University, a deputy director of the Laboratory for Use of Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Economics and a holder of the Soviet Union’s prestigious Lenin Prize.
He will share the $145,000 Nobel Award with Dutch-born Prof. Tjalling Koopmans, 65, a member of the faculty of Yale University. Both men were cited by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm for their studies in the problems of how available resources can best be used in producing goods and services.
Prof. Kantorovich is the author of a number of works, including his book “The Best Use of Economic Resources,” in which he analyzed efficient conditions for an economy as a whole and demonstrated the connection between allocation of resources and prices. He is regarded as the leading representative of the mathematics school in Soviet economic research.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
