Tjalling Koopmans

Tjalling Charles Koopmans ('s-Graveland, August 28, 1910 – New Haven, February 26, 1985) was the joint winner, with Leonid Kantorovich, of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Economics. Koopmans was born in 's-Graveland in the Netherlands. He began his university education at the University of Utrecht, aged 17, specialising in mathematics. Three years later, in 1930, he switched to theoretical physics. In 1933, he met Jan Tinbergen, the 1969 Bank of Sweden prize winner, and moved to Amsterdam to study mathematical economics under him. In addition to mathematical economics, Koopmans extended his explorations to econometrics and statistics. 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 affiliated with the University of Chicago. In 1946, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In... full article at wikipedia