Leonid Hurwicz (Polish pronunciation: [lɛˈɔɲit ˈxurvitʂ]; August 21, 1917 – June 24, 2008) was a Polish–American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design.

Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson) for his seminal work on mechanism design.

In 1941, Hurwicz worked as a research assistant for Paul Samuelson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oskar Lange at the University of Chicago.

[4][5] Interactions of individuals and institutions, markets and trade are analyzed and understood today using the models Hurwicz developed.

Hurwicz, who had graduated from Warsaw University in 1938, at the time of Nazi invasion on Poland was in London, moved to Switzerland then to Portugal and finally in 1940 he emigrated to the United States.

[9][10] Hurwicz hired Evelyn Jensen (born October 31, 1923), who grew up on a Wisconsin farm and was, at the time, an undergraduate in economics at the University of Chicago, as his teaching assistant during the 1940s.

[7] His activities outside the field of economics included research in meteorology and membership in the NSF Commission on Weather Modification.

He helped design the 'walking subcaucus' method of allocating delegates among competing groups, which is still used today by political parties.

"[15] In 1941 Hurwicz was a research assistant to Paul Samuelson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to Oskar Lange at the University of Chicago.

Joining full-time in October 1950 until January 1951, he was a visiting professor, assuming Koopmans' classes in the Department of Economics, and led the commission's research on theory of resource allocation.

[19] Hurwicz was recruited by Walter Heller[8] to the University of Minnesota in 1951, where he became a professor of economics and mathematics in the School of Business Administration.

[8] Although he retired from full-time teaching in 1988,[10] Hurwicz taught graduate school as professor emeritus most recently in the fall of 2006.

[33] Hurwicz's criterion gives each decision a value which is "a weighted sum of its worst and best possible outcomes" represented as α and known as an index of pessimism or optimism.

[29] These four approaches– Laplace, Wald, Hurwicz and Savage– have been studied, corrected and applied for over fifty years by many different people including John Milnor, G. L. S. Shackle,[29] Daniel Ellsberg,[34] R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, in a field some date back to Jacob Bernoulli.

[35] In 2010, the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota launched the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute, a global initiative created to inform public policy by supporting and promoting frontier economic research and by communicating findings to leading academics, policymakers, and business executives around the world.

Funds raised by the Institute are used to attract and retain preeminent faculty and, in part, to support graduate student research.

John Ledyard (2007), Robert Lucas, Roger Myerson, Edward C. Prescott, James Quirk, Nancy Stokey and Neil Wallace are among those who have delivered the lecture since it was inaugurated in 1992.

[citation needed] In October 2007, Hurwicz shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study and Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.

[37] The winners applied game theory, a field advanced by mathematician John Forbes Nash, to discover the best and most efficient means to reach a desired outcome, taking into account individuals' knowledge and self-interest, which may be hidden or private.