Leonid Kantorovich

“"Leonid Kantorovich", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews”

“It is difficult to distinguish another scholar in the history of the twentieth century who contributed as much as him to the fusion of mathematics and economics, the sciences with the antipodal standards of scientific thought. {{w|Israel Gelfand}} pointed out that he can list only John von Neumann and {{w|Andrei Kolmogorov}} alongside Leonid Kantorovich among those few of his contemporaries who synthesized the mathematical and humanitarian cultures.”

“The accounting methods based on mathematical models, the use of computers for computations and information data processing make up only one part of the control mechanism, another part is the control structure.”

“A solution of newly appearing economic problems, and in particular those connected with the scientific-technical revolution often cannot be based on existing methods but needs new ideas and approaches. Such one is the problem of the protection of nature. The problem of economic valuation of technical innovations efficiency and rates of their spreading cannot be solved only by the long-term estimation of direct outcomes and results without accounting peculiarities of new industrial technology, its total contribution to technical progress.”

“In planning the idea of decentralization must be connected with routines of linking plans of rather autonomous parts of the whole system. Here one can use a conditional separation of the system by means of fixing values of flows and parameters transmitted from one part to another. One can use an idea of sequential recomputation of the parameters, which was successfully developed by many authors for the scheme of Dantzig-Wolfe and for aggregative linear models.”

“In our time mathematics has penetrated into economics so solidly, widely and variously, and the chosen theme is connected with such a variety of facts and problems that it brings us to cite the words of {{w|Kozma Prutkov}} which are very popular in our country: "One can not embrace the unembraceable". The appropriateness of this wise sentence is not diminished by the fact that the great thinker is only a pen-name.”

“The university immediately published my pamphlet, and it was sent to fifty People’s Commissariats. It was distributed only in the Soviet Union, since in the days just before the start of the World War it came out in an edition of one thousand copies in all.”

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Different productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for different types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?”