Leonid Hurwicz - Personal Life

Personal Life

Hurwicz was born in Moscow, Russia, to a Jewish family a few months before the October Revolution. The family had originated in Poland and had lived in Congress Poland (the part of Poland then within the Russian Empire) but had been displaced by World War I. Soon after Leonid's birth, the family returned to Warsaw, Poland. Hurwicz and his family experienced persecution by both the Bolsheviks and Nazis, as he again became a refugee when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. His parents and brother fled Warsaw, only to be arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps. 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. His family eventually joined him there.

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. They married in 1944 and later lived on the Mississippi River parkway in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They had four children: Sarah, Michael, Ruth and Maxim.

His interests included linguistics, archaeology, biochemistry and music. His activities outside the field of economics included research in meteorology and membership in the NSF Commission on Weather Modification. When Eugene McCarthy ran for president of the United States, Hurwicz served in 1968 as a McCarthy delegate from Minnesota to the Democratic Party Convention and a member of the Democratic Party Platform Committee. He helped design the 'walking subcaucus' method of allocating delegates among competing groups, which is still used today by political parties. He remained an active Democrat; even attending Precinct Caucus in February 2008, at age 90.

He was hospitalized in mid-June 2008, suffering from renal failure. He died a week later in Minneapolis.