The World Line of Kantorovich

This is an overview of the life and scientific legacy of Leonid V. Kantorovich (1912--1986) who stood at the cradle of linear programming, vector lattices, and computational mathematics. Linear programming as well as mathematical economics belongs to or at least borders the realm of applied mathematics. The epithets “pure” and “applied” for mathematics have many deficiencies provoking endless discussion and controversy. Nevertheless the corresponding brand names persist and proliferate in scientific usage, signifying some definite cultural phenomena. Scientometricians and fellow mathematicians, pondering over this matter, claim usually that the hallmark of the Russian mathematics is the prevalent trend to unity of the applied and pure mathematicians, which is reflected in the common mathematical infrastructure of all major instances of academic life in Russia. Any glimpse of a gap or contradistinction between the pure and applied mathematics usually brings about the smell of collision, emotion, or at least discomfort to every specialist of a Russian provenance. This is in outright contradistinction to the feelings of American mathematicians. The separate existence of the American (1975 awarded the Nobel Prize) Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics is perfectly natural and universally confortable throughout the States. It is rarely taken into account that these special features of the social life of a particular country are linked with the stances and activities of their creative citizens. Leonid Vital'evich Kantorovich (1912--1986) will always rank among those Russian scholars trespassed the border between the pure and applied mathematics by personal contribution. He is an exception even in this noble company because of his extraordinary traits stemming from a quite rare combination of the generous gifts of a polymath and practical economist. Describing the place of Kantorovich in synthesizing the exact and verbal methods of reasoning, I. M. Gelfand, the last of the mathematical giants of the 20th century, wrote:1 Only a very few people of the 20th century turned out to be capable of the required synthesis of the two cultures---mathematics and the human sciences. Among them can name Andrei Kolmogorov who always understood the world as a unified whole. This was also understood, perhaps on a more naive level, with a strong technocratic influence, by John von Neumann. In the field of s cial s iences, closer to the humanities, this synthesis was effected by Leonid Kantorovi h. I