Koopmans, Tjalling C.

Koopmans, Tjalling C. (Charles)

(1910–85) economist; born in the Netherlands. Educated in his native land, he emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1940. After working in a shipping firm, he became a professor of economics at the University of Chicago (1948–55), then moved to Yale in 1955 where he remained until his retirement in 1981. He won the Nobel Prize in economics (1975) for the development of "linear programming," or "activity analysis," sharing the prize with Soviet mathematician-economist, Leonid V. Kantorovich. Linear programming is used to analyze the relationship between maximum output of a business and all possible combinations of inputs.