Robert Dorfman
| Robert Dorfman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 27, 1916 New York City |
| Died | June 24, 2002 (aged 85) Belmont, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
| Institution | Harvard University |
| Field | Political economy |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor |
William Fellner R. Aaron Gordon |
Robert Dorfman (27 October 1916 – 24 June 2002) was emeritus professor of political economy at Harvard University. Dorfman made great contributions to the fields of economics, group testing and in the process of coding theory.
His paper—'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943) is a landmark in the sphere of Combinatorial Group Testing. To quote collaborator and Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow—"After starting his career as a statistician—his paper 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943) is still a landmark—he turned to economics at the moment when linear models of production and allocation captured the profession's imagination." Dorfman co-authored "Linear Programming and Economic Analysis" with Solow and economist Paul A. Samuelson.
Dorfman was born in New York on 27 October 1916. He received his B.A. in Mathematical Statistics from Columbia College, NY in 1936 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1937. He worked for the federal government as a statistician for 4 years, starting in 1939 and also served as an operations analyst for the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War. In 1946, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley and got his Ph.D. in Economics in 1950 with thesis titled Applications of Linear Programming to the Theory of the Firm. Dorfman finally moved to Harvard in 1955. Dorfman's career at Harvard spanned 32 years. Professor of Economics from 1955 to 1972, Dorfman became the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in 1972, a position he held until his retirement in 1987.
According to his wife Nancy, Dorfman turned to mathematics as an alternative to poetry after realizing that he did not have a future as a poet. According to the Harvard Gazette, "His lifelong love of poetry and literature was reflected in the clarity and grace with which he was able to explain complex economics in simple language, widely remarked upon by his colleagues.
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