Born in a Jewish family of Kyiv,[1][2] Jacob Marschak (until 1933 Jakob) was the son of a jeweler.

With the gathering Nazi storm, he emigrated to England, where he went to Oxford to teach at the Oxford Institute of Statistics,[1] which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, allowing him to emigrate to the United States in 1939.

[1] After teaching at the New School for Social Research, in 1943, he went to University of Chicago, where he led the Cowles Commission.

Shortly before he was due to become president of the American Economic Association, he died from a cardiac arrest.

[2] UCLA sponsors the recurring Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavior Sciences.