Tjalling C. Koopmans | |
---|---|
Born |
's-Graveland, Netherlands |
August 28, 1910
Died | February 26, 1985 New Haven, Connecticut, USA |
(aged 74)
Nationality | Dutch, American |
Fields | Economics, Physics |
Alma mater |
University of Utrecht University of Leiden |
Doctoral advisor |
Hans Kramers Jan Tinbergen |
Doctoral students |
Carl Christ Stanley Reiter Rolf Mantel Guillermo Calvo |
Known for |
Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans model Koopmans' theorem |
Influenced | John Denis Sargan, Alok Bhargava, Trygve Haavelmo |
Notable awards | Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1975) |
Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was a Dutch American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. Koopmans showed that on the basis of certain efficiency criteria, it is possible to make important deductions concerning optimum price systems.
Koopmans was born in 's-Graveland, Netherlands. He began his university education at the Utrecht University at seventeen, specializing in mathematics. Three years later, in 1930, he switched to theoretical physics. In 1933, he met Jan Tinbergen, the winner of the 1969 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, and moved to Amsterdam to study mathematical economics under him. In addition to mathematical economics, Koopmans extended his explorations to econometrics and statistics. In 1936 he graduated from Leiden University with a PhD, under the direction of Hendrik Kramers. The title of the thesis was "Linear regression analysis of economic time series".
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 Cowles Commission for Research in Economics affiliated with the University of Chicago. In 1946, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States and in 1948 director of the Cowles Commission. Also in 1948, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Rising hostile opposition to the Cowles Commission by the department of economics at University of Chicago during the 1950s led Koopmans to convince the Cowles family to move it to Yale University in 1955 (where it was renamed the Cowles Foundation). He continued to publish, on the economics of optimal growth and activity analysis.