Robert Dorfman

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. His analysis of the water resources in Pakistan helped draw engineers and hydrologists and got significant work done towards the preservation and economic use of scarce natural resources. In the later years of his professional life, he turned his focus towards economic history. His work in the area of capital theory and its antecedent led to the modernization of economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk's 19th century "Austrian" theory of capital.

His paper—'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943) is a landmark in the sphere of Combinatorial Group Testing. 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." Dorfman co-authored Linear Programming and Economic Analysis with Solow and economist Paul A. Samuelson.

In the preface to his collected works, "Economic Theory and Public Decisions"(1997), Dorfman expressed his personal reservations about "reducing the amount of instruction in the social science side of economics to make way for mathematics." He however, remained ambivalent about the costs and the benefits of this change in methodology while recognizing its inevitability. 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."

He is an actor and director, known for It Could Happen To You (1994), Mad About You (1992) and Couple Days. . .

Dorfman received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Ford Faculty Research Fellowships; he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1976 to 1984, he served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. During his long and wide-ranging career, Dorfman was vice president of the American Economic Association, vice president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and member of several committees focused on environmental concerns. He chaired the National Research Council's Committee on Prototype Analysis of Pesticides in 1978. He was elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Robert Dorfman was born on October 8, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York, USA.

Robert Dorfman (27 October 1916 – 24 June 2002) was professor of political economy at Harvard University. Dorfman made great contributions to the fields of economics, statistics, group testing and in the process of coding theory.