Koopmans was born in
's-Graveland,
Netherlands. He began his university education at the
Utrecht University at seventeen, specializing in mathematics. Three years later, in 1930, he switched to theoretical physics. In 1933, he met
Jan Tinbergen, the winner of the 1969 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and moved to
Amsterdam to study
mathematical economics under him. In addition to mathematical economics, Koopmans extended his explorations to
econometrics and
statistics. In 1936, he graduated from
Leiden University with a PhD, under the direction of
Hendrik Kramers. The title of the thesis was "Linear regression analysis of economic time series". He also worked for the
Economic and Financial Organization of the
League of Nations. Koopmans moved to the
United States in 1940. There, he worked for a while for a government body in
Washington, D.C., where he published on the
economics of transportation focusing on optimal routing, then moved to
Chicago where he joined a research body, the
Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, affiliated with the
University of Chicago. In 1946, he became a
naturalized citizen of the
United States, and in 1948, director of the Cowles Commission. Also in 1948, he was elected as a
Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 1950, he became a corresponding member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rising hostile opposition to the Cowles Commission by the department of economics at University of Chicago during the 1950s led Koopmans to convince the Cowles family to move it to
Yale University in 1955 (where it was renamed the
Cowles Foundation). He continued to publish, on the
economics of optimal growth and activity analysis. Koopmans's early works on the
Hartree-Fock theory of atomic and molecular structure are associated with the
Koopmans' theorem, which is very well known in
quantum chemistry. Koopmans was awarded his Nobel memorial prize (jointly with Leonid Kantorovich) for his contributions to the field of resource allocation, specifically the theory of optimal use of resources. The work for which the prize was awarded focused on activity analysis, the study of interactions between the inputs and outputs of
production, and their relationship to
economic efficiency and
prices. Finally, the importance of the article by Koopmans (1942) deriving the distribution of the serial correlation coefficient was recognized by
John von Neumann, and it later influenced the optimal tests for a
unit root by
John Denis Sargan and
Alok Bhargava (Sargan and Bhargava, 1983).
Family and name Tjalling Charles Koopmans was a son of Sjoerd Koopmans and Wytske van der Zee; his
middle name Charles was probably derived from his
patronymic "Sjoerds". One of Sjoerd Koopmans's sisters, Gatske Koopmans, and her husband Symon van der Meer were the paternal grandparents of Nobel Prize winner
Simon van der Meer. Tjalling Koopmans and Simon van der Meer were therefore
first cousins once removed. Tjalling had two brothers, one of whom was
theologian Rev. Dr
Jan Koopmans, who in 1940, early during the
German occupation of the Netherlands, wrote the widely distributed pamphlet "
Bijna te laat" ("
Almost too late", 30,000 copies), warning about the future of the Jews under the Nazi regime. In 1945, towards the end of the war, he witnessed an execution of hostages in
Amsterdam from behind a window and was mortally wounded by a stray bullet. Koopmans married Truus Wanningen in October 1936. The couple had three children – a son, Henry, and two daughters, Anne and Helen. == Selected works ==