Hurwicz, Leonid (1917– )

Russian-born US economist. He won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2007 for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory, which he shared with two other economists, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, who built on his work.

Hurwicz published seminal works on mechanism design theory in 1960 and 1972. This theory allows economists and other social scientists to analyse the performance of institutions and has given many important insights as well as influenced economic policy and market institutions. Hurwicz was a researcher with the Cowles Commission in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was located at the University of Chicago. He has been a faculty member in the department of economics at the University of Minnesota since 1951, and became an emeritus professor.

Born in Moscow into a Jewish family of Polish origins who returned to Warsaw in 1919 shortly after the Russian revolution, Hurwicz graduated in law from Warsaw University in 1938, with economics as a secondary subject. He then became a research student at the London School of Economics, moving to Geneva and then to the USA in 1940. He was president of the Econometrics Society in 1969 and received the 1990 National Medal of Sciences, among many other honours. While he is renowned for his pioneering economic theory he is also known for his interest in a wide variety of subjects, from linguistics to biochemistry to music.

Known as a gentle and supportive teacher who treats everyone as his intellectual equal, he is internationally admired and respected and has taken on numerous visiting professorships during his career. On receiving the news of his award, Hurwicz, with characteristic humility, said that he suspected that he had received it because he had outlived his contemporaries. He was the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize.