I was born in 1910 in 's Graveland, the Netherlands, the third son of Sjoerd Koopmans and Wijtske van der Zee. Both my parents had been trained as schoolteachers and my father was principal of the (Protestant) "School with the Bible". Our house was squeezed between the two sections of that...

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1975

I was born in Petersburg (Leningrad) on 19th January 1912. My father, Vitalij Kantorovich, died in 1922 and it was my mother, Paulina (Saks), who brought me up. Some of the first events of my childhood were the February and the October Revolutions of 1917, and a one-year trip to Byelorussia...

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1975