To quote collaborator and Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow—"After starting his career as a statistician—his paper 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943) is still a landmark—he turned to economics at the moment when linear models of production and allocation captured the profession's imagination."
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.
[2] 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.
According to the Harvard Gazette,[1] "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."
Apart from his work in group testing, he made great contributions to environmental economics, especially regarding natural resources in the Middle East and South Asia.
To quote James Duesenberry, Professor Emeritus of Economics and a longtime colleague of Dorfman's, "He was really devoted to scholarship; he was a very careful worker in everything he did, he was always a public-spirited member of this department."