Workshop History

Leonid Hurwicz lived in Warsaw until 1938 and studied at the University of Warsaw. He frequently visited Poland in the 1990s. In 1994, he was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) by SGH Warsaw School of Economics. A special plaque commemorates his connection with SGH Warsaw School of Economics.  

Hurwicz is often credited with introducing a rigorous mathematical approach to economic analysis. He received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2007 for his fundamental contributions to the theory of economic mechanism design. The theory of mechanism design relies heavily on mathematical methods, including functional analysis, differential equations, differential topology, and dynamical systems. Hurwicz made significant contributions not only to economics but also to mathematics, particularly in the field of nonlinear programming.

Soon after Leo Hurwicz received his Nobel Prize in Economics, a group of researchers, including Prof. Łukasz Stettner, Prof. Aleksander Strasburger, Prof. Tomasz Szapiro, Prof. Jan Werner, and Prof. Tomasz Żylicz, initiated a collaborative effort to organize a conference in his honor. This initiative was jointly undertaken by the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IM PAN), the Collegium of Economic Analysis at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics (SGH), and the Faculty of Applied Informatics and Mathematics at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences and is continued by IM PAN, SGH and the University of Warsaw. Below, you may find some selection of photos from the past Hurwicz Workshops 2009 - 2024.

The first Hurwicz Memorial Lecture was presented by Stefan Rolewicz (PAN) in 2009. The following ones were presented by Eric Maskin (Harvard) in 2010, Roger Myerson (Chicago) in 2011, Ramon Marimon (EUI) in 2012, Martin Hellwig (Max Planck Institute) in 2014, Walter Trockel (Bielefeld University) in 2016, Fernando Vega-Redondo (Bocconi University) in 2018, Rabah Amir (University of Iowa) in 2022 and Hervé Moulin (University of Glasgow) as well as M. Ali Khan (Johns Hopkins University) in 2024.