L. V. Kantorovich

Abstract

This article is a reflection on the life and work of Nobel Prize winner L. V. Kantorovich. Firstly it presents the problem which is considered to have altered his intellectual life, centering it away from Mathematics and on to Economics: the resolution of the optimal production plan of a productive activity: a sawmill; from that problem, Kantorovich passed on to much more general ideas, relative to the optimal manner of planning an economy. In Kantorovich`s method there appear problems of valuation of scarce materials and natural resources, in conflict with value approaches determined only by labour inputs. The ideological implications of the method blocked the publication of his book in the Soviet Union for seventeen years.