Tjalling C. Koopmans

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Koopmans (1967)

Tjalling Charles Koopmans (born August 28, 1910 in 's-Graveland, today to Wijdemeren , † February 26, 1985 in New Haven, Connecticut ) was an American economist and physicist of Dutch descent. In 1975 he and Leonid Witaljewitsch Kantorowitsch received the Prize for Economics from the Swedish Reichsbank in memory of Alfred Nobel for their contribution to the theory of the optimal use of resources.

Origin and education

Koopmans was the son of a teacher couple and went to school in Hilversum . From 1927 to 1932 he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Utrecht . During his studies he became interested in economics and studied with Jan Tinbergen in Amsterdam and Ragnar Frisch in Oslo. In 1936 he received his doctorate from the University of Leiden with a thesis on linear regression analysis in economics .

Professional background

From 1936 he was a colleague of his former teacher Jan Tinbergen for a few years at the Dutch Business School in Rotterdam and then also with Tinbergen at the League of Nations in Geneva, where he worked on modeling economic cycles.

After the occupation of France and the Netherlands by the Wehrmacht, he went into exile in the USA. He conducted research at Princeton (1940/41), then worked for the Mutual Life Insurance Company in Philadelphia and for the British merchant ship mission in Washington, DC , where he worked on the optimization of shipping routes between the USA and England. He published his results in an article in 1944 ( Exchange ratio between cargos on different routes , first published in 1970), which established activity analysis in production theory. His work from this time made him one of the pioneers of linear programming alongside Kantorowitsch and George Dantzig . In 1944 he joined the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago and in 1955 he went to Yale University , where he became the Alfred Cowles Professor of Economics and retired in 1980.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1960). In 1978 Koopmans was president of the American Economic Association after the originally elected Jacob Marschak passed away before taking office. In 1962 he and Richard Williamson gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm with the title Utility and time: an axiomatic discussion .

He had been married to the economist Truus Wanningen since 1936, with whom he had two daughters and a son. In 1946 he became a US citizen.

Awards and honors

The Tjalling C. Koopmans Prize of the econometric journal Econometric Theory is named after Koopmans .

literature

  • TC Koopmans: Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. In: Cowles Commission Monograph. No. 13, New York, London 1951.
  • Koopmans, AF Bausch: Selected topics in economics involving mathematical reasoning. 1959
  • Koopmans: Three essays on the state of economic science. McGraw Hill 1957
  • Koopmans (editor): Statistical inference in dynamic economic models (Cowles Commission Research Staff and Guests), Wiley 1950
  • Koopmans, Wood (Editor): Studies in econometric method (Cowles Commission Research Staff), Wiley 1953
  • Koopmans: Tanker freight rates and tankship building; an analysis of cyclical fluctuations. Haarlem, London 1939
  • M. Beckmann , CF Christ, M. Nerlove (Editors): Scientific papers of Tjalling C. Koopmans. Springer Verlag 1970

Web links

Commons : Tjalling Koopmans  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed October 28, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Koopmans, Tjalling C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Koopmans, Tjalling Charles (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and physicist of Dutch descent
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH 's-Graveland , Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1985
Place of death New Haven (Connecticut)