Koopmans, Tjalling Charles << KOOP muhnz, TYAHL ihng shahrl >> (1910-1985), a Dutch-born American economist, shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for economic sciences with Russian Leonid Kantorovich for work on how economic resources should be distributed and used. Koopmans described a method for using resources in such a way as to achieve the lowest cost. He did this by devising equations that related the cost of obtaining materials and transporting them to a variety of locations to the final cost of the product.
Koopmans was born at ‘s Graveland in the Netherlands. He studied mathematics and physics at the universities of Utrecht and Leiden. In 1936, he was awarded a Ph.D. in economics at Leiden. In 1940, he settled in the United States, where he worked for the British Merchant Shipping Mission. He began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1944 and became a United States citizen in 1946. In 1955, he became professor of economics at Yale University. Two years later, his book Three Essays on the State of Economic Science was published. From 1961 to 1967 he served as director of Yale’s Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. He died in New Haven, Connecticut.
See also Kantorovich, Leonid Vitaliyevich .
