Nikolay Prokofyevich Fedorenko () (26 April/28 April 1917 – 1 April 2006) was a Russian economist and chemist. He was the head of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute (CEMI) in Moscow from 1963 to 1985. Biography Fedorenko graduated from Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technologies. His name is associated with an economic planning methodology used in the former Soviet Union and known as the System of Optimal Functioning of the Economy (SOFE). During the Soviet period SOFE was a controversial approach using mathematical planning methods in order to improve the central planning system (see Jürgen Drzymalla (1991), pp. 239 and pp. 297). These methods were based on the idea of linear programming or "optimal planning", associated with L.V. Kantorovich. In 1971 N.P. Fedorenko presented a system of 'objective-directed' plan models, consisting of 17 components: 1. Long-run forecasts, 2. Objectives 3. Elaboration of programmes, 4. Resources, 5. 'Objective-oriented' programmes, 6. Requirements in resources, 7. Evaluation of programmes from the point of view of objectives and resources , 8. Adoption of programmes, 9. Elaboration of resource-programmes, 10. Resource programmes, 11. 'Complex-system' plan, 12. Models of sub-optimization, sectoral and regional, 13. Macro-models of overall optimization (national economy), 14. System of intersectoral and interregional models, including the intersectoral and interregional 'balance', 15. Social balance of plans. 16. Extra-economic resources, 17. The system's operation. (Source: N.P. Fedorenko, in EMM [Economika i matemateskie metody], 4 (1971), quoted by Alfred Zauberman (1975), p. 491) Alfred Zauberman presents a graphical design of this complex planning system with boxes and relation arrows. The SOFE approach was sharply criticized by Soviet economists such as Bojarskij, who was a Soviet mathematical economist (see Pekka Sutela (1984), p. 95). Many of them saw the mathematical methods as being too close to Western economic approaches. They were afraid that Soviet political economic theory would disappear behind the mathematical formulas, and that the Soviet economic theory would finally be assimilated into Western economic theory, which also uses well known mathematical formulas in microeconomics, macroeconomics, game theory, distribution theory and others. M. Bor and S. Logvinov wrote in an article in the GOSPLAN (the former Soviet planning authority's) journal, that SOFE had to be condemned as: "an attempt to introduce a special concept of 'optimal planning', calculated to supplant the supposedly non-scientific system of empirical planning; striving to unite vulgar utility theory with the labour theory of value, to present price as a measure of