Robert Dorfman

Robert Dorfman (27 October 1916 – 24 June 2002) was a renowned professor of political economy at Harvard University. He was widely recognized for his significant contributions to the fields of economics, statistics, group testing, and coding theory. Dorfman's groundbreaking paper, 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' (1943), remains a seminal work in Combinatorial Group Testing. He transitioned from his early career as a statistician to economics, co-authoring the influential book 'Linear Programming and Economic Analysis' with Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow and economist Paul A. Samuelson. Dorfman was born in New York on 27 October 1916, and he earned his B.A. in Mathematical Statistics from Columbia College, NY in 1936 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1937.