Dorfman was born in
New York on 27 October 1916. He received his B.A. in
Mathematical Statistics from Columbia College, NY in 1936 and his M.A. from
Columbia University in 1937. In 1939 he published an important paper on the so-called
delta method, widely used in statistics to establish parameters of non-linear functions of random variables. He worked for the federal government as a statistician for 4 years, starting in 1939 and also served as an operations analyst for the
United States Army Air Forces during the
Second World War. In 1946, he enrolled at the
University of California, Berkeley and got his
Ph.D. in Economics in 1950 with thesis titled
Applications of Linear Programming to the Theory of the Firm. Dorfman finally moved to Harvard in 1955. Dorfman's career at Harvard spanned 32 years. Professor of Economics from 1955 to 1972, Dorfman became the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in 1972, a position he held until his retirement in 1987. According to his wife Nancy, Dorfman turned to mathematics as an alternative to poetry after realizing that he did not have a future as a poet. According to the Harvard Gazette, "His lifelong love of poetry and literature was reflected in the clarity and grace with which he was able to explain complex economics in simple language, widely remarked upon by his colleagues." Dorfman received many honors, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship and two Ford Faculty Research Fellowships; he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1976 to 1984, he served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. During his long and wide-ranging career, Dorfman was vice president of the American Economic Association, vice president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and member of several committees focused on environmental concerns. He chaired the National Research Council's Committee on Prototype Analysis of Pesticides in 1978. To quote Solow, "Always polite, even self-deprecating, never assertive, he nevertheless stood his ground. If Bob Dorfman mildly and quizzically expressed some hesitation about your pet idea, it was always a good move to look up, just in case a boulder was about to crash down on you—politely, of course." == Work and professional opinions ==