Tjalling Koopmans
Tjalling Koopmans was a Dutch-American economist who worked on minimizing shipping costs for the Allies in World War II, developed activity analysis, and shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in economics.
What they did and why it matters
Koopmans applied optimization to moving cargo efficiently, and the transportation problem he helped solve is still at the heart of freight and network planning. As a statistician for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board, he studied how to route ships among ports to minimize empty sailing and cost, a problem now called the Hitchcock-Koopmans transportation problem. He also proposed the name linear programming. Modern freight optimization, from planning truck lanes to repositioning empty containers, uses methods he helped establish.
Related people
Sources
- Tjalling Charles Koopmans (Econlib) econlib.org
- Tjalling C. Koopmans brief biography (INFORMS) informs.org