Leonid Hurwicz's Game

Hurwicz contacted a cousin in Chicago, whom his parents had told him would help if he needed to leave. In 1940, 23 years old and all alone in the world but for a cousin he’d never met who wired money and an address, Hurwicz booked passage on an Italian boat.

“In a month—no less—Mussolini joined Hitler,” Hurwicz recalls. His ticket was now worthless. “That was bad luck for me, because there was the question of how to get my money back. Also, even if I had money, how did I travel from Switzerland to some city which was not on Hitler’s side and could get me to America?”

He found a way. An airline opened briefly between Geneva and Barcelona, both neutral cities. Hurwicz was able to fly to Spain and take a train to Madrid, then Lisbon. He spent two months in a Portuguese city “like Monte Carlo,” tutoring the children of wealthy Spanish and French families vacationing there. Then Hurwicz got word of a Greek boat sailing for New Jersey.

At Chicago, he hired, sight unseen, a young teaching assistant from Wisconsin named Evelyn Jensen. They were married in 1944; the first of their four children was born two years later.

He asked the harbormaster for help getting his money back from the Italian company, suggesting that the harbormaster could threaten to take the company’s license away, and that if he didn’t succeed, he would have Hurwicz on his hands for the duration of the war. With a refund and the little he had earned tutoring, Hurwicz booked passage on the Greek boat.

In Chicago, he lived with his cousins deep in the Polish section of town—sleeping on their couch and auditing courses at the University of Chicago. Finally, he got an offer of a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “from someone who is very well known: Paul Samuelson. The job was teaching and being a research assistant for only one semester—a term no self-respecting graduate student would accept,” Hurwicz says. “But I had no other offers. In fact, it was a miracle I had this one.”

He moved to Massachusetts and began working under Samuelson, who would win the Nobel Prize for economics in 1970. At MIT, Hurwicz tested a hypothesis about how businesses arrive at prices for their goods and services. He returned to Chicago in mid-June, by now a more desirable candidate for academic appointment.