More important it was to see with my own eyes the First War's induced boom in the U.S. Steel-planned Gary, Indiana: East European workers were overjoyed to be able to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. I saw, too, and my family learned the hard way, how recession follows the boom the way sparrows used to follow the horse. Also, when I was age 10 and we lived in Miami Beach, Florida, I experienced first hand what a real estate mania was like. And what it was like when the bubble burst.

All that prepared me for the Great Depression and for post-war inflation. My Chicago-trained mind resisted tenaciously the Keynesian revolution; but reason won out over tradition and dogma.

So after all, as I look back in my ninth decade over my long career in economics, I realize that all those incidents of good luck have to be understood against the background of fundamental trends in economic history. Mine has been a grandstand seat from which to observe most of a century of basic economic history. Bliss it was to be in the forefront of the revolutions that have changed economics forever.

Always I have been overpaid to do what has been pure fun.

Autobiography of Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich (1912 — 1986)

I was born in Petersburg on 19th January, 1912. My father, Vitalij Kantorovich, died in 1922 and it was my mother, Paulina (Saks), who brought me up. Some of the first events of my childhood were the February and the October Revolutions of 1917, and a one-year trip to Byelorussia during the Civil War.

My first interest in sciences and the first displays of self-dependent thinking manifested themselves in about 1920. On entering the Mathematical Department of the Leningrad University in 1926, 1 was mainly interested in sciences (but also in political economy and modern history, thanks to the most vivid lectures of academician E. Tarle).

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defined for some of pairs of elements. This theory of partially-ordered spaces turned out to be very fruitful and was being developed at approximately the same time in the USA, Japan and in the Netherlands. On this subject I contacted J. von Neumann, G. Birkhoff, A.W. Tucker, M. Frechet and other mathematicians whom I met at the Moscow Topological Congress (1935). One of my memoires on functional equations was published as a result of the invitation extended to me by T. Carleman in Acta Mathematica. Functional Analysis in Semiotdered Spaces, the first complete book of our contributions in this field, was published in 1950 by my colleagues, B.Z. Vulikh and A.G. Pinsker, and I.

In those days, my theoretical and applied research had nothing in common. But later, especially in the postwar period, I succeeded in linking them and showing broad possibilities for using the ideas of functional analysis in Numerical Mathematics. This I proved in my paper, the very title of which, Functional Analysis and Applied Mathematics, seemed, at that time, paradoxical. In 1949, the work was awarded the State Prize and later was included in the book, Functional Analysis in Normed Spaces, written with G.P. Akilov (1959).

In 1939, the Leningrad University Press printed my booklet called

The Mathematical Method of Production Planning and Organization which was devoted to the formulation of the basic economic problems, their mathematical form, a sketch of the solution method, and the first discussion of its economic sense. In essence, it contained the main ideas of the theories and algorithms of linear programming. The work remained unknown for many years to Western scholars. Later, Tjalling Koopmans, George Dantzing, et al, found these results and, moreover, in their own way; But their contributions remained unknown to me until the middle of the 50s.

I recognized the broad horizons offered by this work at an early stage. It could be carried forward in three directions:

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1.The further development of methods of solving these extremal problems and their generalization; their application to separate classes of problems.

2.A mathematical generalization of these problems such as, nonlinear problems, problems in functional spaces, the application of these methods to extremal problems of mathematics, mechanics and technical sciences.

3.The spreading of the method of description and analysis from separate economic problems to general economic systems with their application to planning problems on the level of an industry, a region, the whole national economy as well as the analysis of the structure of economic indices.

Some activity took place in the first two directions (the results were published partly immediately, partly after the war), but the third one lured me most. I hope that the reasons were clarified enough in my Nobel lecture.

The studies were interrupted by the war. During the war, I worked as Professor of the Higher School for Naval Engineers. But even then I found time to continue my deliberations in the realm of economics. It was then that I wrote the first version of my book. Having returned to Leningrad in 1944, I worked at the University and at the Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, heading the Department of Approximate Methods. At that time, I became interested in computation problems, with some results in the automation of programming and in computer construction.

My economics studies progressed as well. I particularly wish to mention the work done in 1948 — 1950 at the Leningrad CarriageBuilding Works by geometrist V.A. Zalgaller under my guidance. Here the optimal use of steel sheets was calculated by linear programming methods and saved material. Our book of 1951 summarized our experience and gave a systematic explanation of our algorithms including the combination of linear programming with the idea of dynamic programming.

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