Jan Tinbergen
Jan Tinbergen (April 12, 1903 – June 9, 1994), was a Dutch economist.
Tinbergen, who held a Ph.D. in physics, had become interested in economics while working on his dissertation, “Minimum Problems in Physics and Economics” (1929). He began to apply mathematical tools to economics, which at the time was a relatively verbal and nonmathematical discipline. In 1929 he joined a unit of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics to do research on business cycles. He stayed there until 1945, taking a leave of absence from 1936 to 1938 to work for the League of Nations in Geneva.
Tinbergen developed the first national comprehensive macroeconomic model, which he first developed in 1936 for the Netherlands, and later applied to the United States and the United Kingdom.
Tinbergen was a founding member of the Econometric Society, together with Irving, Ragnar Frisch and others. The main object of the Society was to promote studies that aim at a unification of the theoretical-quantitative and empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems and that were penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences.
Jan Tinbergen was awarded the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes.
Tinbergen's work on macroeconomic models was later continued by Lawrence Klein, contributing to another Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His brother Nikolaas won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1969/