Kantorovich was a professor of economics at the University of Leningrad from 1944 to 1960. He became the Director of Mathematical Economic Methods at the Siberian Division of the Soviet Academy of Science in 1960. He was appointed as the Laboratory Chie f of the Institute of National Economic Management in Moscow in 1971. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1975 with Tjalling Koopman "for their contribution to the theory of optimum allocation of resources."

"His first major breakthrough came in 1938 when he was consulting to the Soviet Government's Laboratory of the Plywood Trust. Asked to devise a technique for distributing raw materials to maximize inputs, Kantorovich saw that the problem was a mathematic al one: to maximize a linear function subject ot many contstraints. This technique he developed is now known as linear programming."

Works by Leonid Vitalievich Kantorovich:

The Mathematical Method of Produciton Planning and Organization

The Best Uses of Economic Resources