Leonid Hurwicz

**Leonid Hurwicz** (August 21, 1917 – June 24, 2008) was an American economist and mathematician. He won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Hurwicz invented the economic sciences of incentive compatibility and mechanism design. International economy and trade is studied using the ideas Professor Hurwicz had.

Hurwicz worked as Regents Professor of Economics (head teacher of economics) at the University of Minnesota. Professor Hurwicz believed that game theory is very important. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for their work on ways mechanism design.

## Personal life
Professor Hurwicz was born in Moscow, Russia to a Jewish family a few months before the October Revolution. His family is Polish and had lived in Congress Kingdom (the part of Poland then in the Russian Empire) but they moved to Russia to escape World War I. Soon after Professor Hurwicz was born, the family returned to Warsaw, in Poland. and later, lived on the Mississippi River parkway in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They have four children called Sarah, Michael, Ruth and Maxim.

He has interests in linguistics, archaeology, biochemistry and music. and studied Ludwig von Mises teaching. After moving to the United States he studied more economics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Professor Hurwicz does not have a degree in economics but he won the Nobel prize for economics in 2007. He said, "Whatever economics I learned, I learned by listening and learning."

In 1941 Hurwicz was helping Paul Samuelson to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and helping Oskar Lange to teach at the University of Chicago. Then from 1942 to 1944, at the University of Chicago, he was a member of the faculty of the Institute of Meteorology and taught statistics in the Department of Economics. His advisors in 1942 were Jacob Marschak and Tjalling Koopmans of the University of Chicago, who now work for the Cowles Foundation at Yale University.

## Teaching and studies
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Hurwicz received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1945–1946. Hurwicz continued to be a consultant to the Cowles Commission until about 1961.

 and Asia to teach and do research.]]
Hurwicz was given a job by Walter Heller at the University of Minnesota in 1951, where he became a professor of economics and mathematics in the School of Business Administration. In 2007 his ongoing research was described by the University of Minnesota as "comparison and analysis of systems and techniques of economic organization, welfare economics, game-theoretic implementation of social choice goals, and modeling economic institutions." Professor Hurwiczs published works in these fields date back to 1944. Professor Hurwicz is known internationally for his good work researching economic theory, specially with rules for big businesses and governments using mathematical economics. In the 1950s, he worked with Kenneth Arrow on non-linear programming. Hurwicz helped Daniel McFadden,

Hurwiczs work was important to help show how large economic systems should be studied. Some of these systems are capitalism and socialism. Professor Hurwiczs ideas of how to share wealth are also very important. The theory of incentive compatibility that Hurwicz developed changed the way many economists think about sharing in the future, explaining why centrally planned economies may fail and how rewards for certain people make a difference when making decisions.

Hurwicz is part of teams who edit several journals. He co-edited and contributed to two collections for Cambridge University Press: *Studies in Resource Allocation Processes* (1978, with Kenneth Arrow) and *Social Goals and Social Organization* (1987, with David Schmeidler and Hugo Sonnenschein). His recent journals include "Economic Theory" (2003, with Thomas Marschak), "Review of Economic Design" (2001, with Stanley Reiter) and "Advances in Mathematical Economics" (2003, with Marcel K. Richter). Hurwicz has taught works by Fisher-Schultz (1963), Richard T. Ely (1972), David Kinley (1989) and Colin Clark (1997).

## Awards
### Memberships and honorary degrees
Hurwicz was voted to be a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1947 and in 1969 was the Econometric Societys president. Hurwicz was made part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. In 1974 he was made a part of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1977 was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

### Using Hurwiczs name
Some important things have been given Professor Hurwicz's name such as the ***Hurwicz criterion***, an idea that Professor Hurwicz had in 1950, and is thought of as very important for economics. The Hurwicz Criterion is also called "under uncertainty". Hurwicz had the idea of putting Abraham Walds work together with work done by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1812. The Hurwicz Criterion tells people to think very carefully of what is good and what is bad before making decisions. R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, but some people say the work was started by Jacob Bernoulli.

The ***Leonid Hurwicz Distinguished Lecture*** is given to the Minnesota Economic Association. John Ledyard (2007), Robert Lucas, Roger Myerson, Edward C. Prescott, James Quirk, Nancy Stokey and Neil Wallace are some of the people who have given the lecture since it was thought to be important in 1992.

### Nobel Economics Prize
In October 2007, Hurwicz shared *The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel* with Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study and Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." During a telephone interview, a member of the Nobel Foundation told Hurwicz and his wife that Hurwicz is the oldest person ever to win the Nobel Prize. Hurwicz said, "I hope that others who deserve it also got it." When he was asked what the most important part of mechanism design is, he said welfare economics. The three Nobel prize winners used game theory work by mathematician John Forbes Nash, to discover the best way to reach a good outcome, without forgetting individual people. Mechanism design has been used as a guide for talks and taxation, voting and elections,

Professor Hurwicz was not able to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm because of his age, Hurwicz received the prize in Minneapolis. Accompanied by Evelyn, his wife for sixty years, and his family, he was the most important guest at a meeting in the University of Minnesota with the university president Robert Bruininks. After watching the Nobel Prize awards ceremony on television, Jonas Hafstrom, the Swedish ambassador to the United States, awarded the Economics Prize to Professor Hurwicz.

## Important work by Professor Hurwicz
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## Related pages
* List of Nobel Prize winners by country

## Notes
## References
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