June 3 was the official opening of the NSU Leonid Kantorovich auditorium that was named in honor of the mathematician and economist, one of the creators of linear programming and Nobel Laureate in Economics who lived and worked in Novosibirsk for more than ten years.
Auditorium 3307 in the NSU new building was renamed in honor of Leonid Vitalievich Kantorovich. Its opening was part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Economics Department. Novosibirsk Mayor Anatoly Lokot, NSU Rector Mikhail Fedoruk and Dean of the Economics Department Gagik Mkrtchyan, as well as the graduates of the Department, took part in the ceremony.
Abel Aganbegyan, who considers himself a student of Leonid Kantorovich and went on to became one of the founders of the Economics Department, shared his memories of the Nobel Laureate and life during the development of the Novosibirsk State University Economics Department.
“I consider Leonid Kantorovich my teacher, although he always denied it because he was not my direct teacher. However, he was my scientific leader in the ideological sense, in the highest meaning of the word. Leonid Vitalievich was a genius and his whole life was a demonstration of that. He graduated from school at 15 and published his first scientific work in mathematics at 17. At the age of 19 he graduated from Leningrad University. When Leonid Vitalievich was 22, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences awarded him a doctoral degree without requiring a defense of his dissertation. The Academy Charter allows for such an award. I was a member of the Presidium of the Academy for six years, and in this is the only such case I am aware of”, said Abel Aganbegyan.
Leonid Kantorovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1912 into a doctor’s family. The face of modern economic science is largely defined by the works of Leonid Vitalievich. He was among the first scientists invited to work in the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences when it was created in 1957. From 1960 to 1971 he worked in Novosibirsk, established and headed the Mathematics and Economics Department of the Institute of Mathematics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and also worked as the Head of the Department of Computational Mathematics at Novosibirsk University. In 1975, Kantorovich won the Nobel Prize in Economics, "for his contribution to the theory of optimal allocation of resources."
