George Dantzig

George Bernard Dantzig ( born November 8, 1914 in Portland (Oregon ), † 13 May 2005 Stanford ( California)) was an American mathematician. He is considered the father of linear programming, a sub- area of operations research. He was known primarily developed by him simplex method.

Life

Dantzig was born into a poor family. He attended Powell Junior High School in Washington, DC, where he achieved through the encouragement of his father and his own motivation after initially sluggish progress in mathematics excellent grades. This trend continued in the Central High School, where he was especially interested in geometry. He was supported mainly by a math teacher, a school friend and later professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and his father, Tobias, who had worked with Henri Poincaré in Paris.

Dantzig studied mathematics at the University of Maryland, because it could not finance studies at a more prestigious university, his parents. In 1936 he earned the degree B. A. in mathematics and physics. In the same year he married Anne Shmuner, moved with her ​​to Ann Arbor and began further studies with the aim of doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. This he finished 1937 with a M. A. in mathematics. He did not include doctoral studies at first because it was not the abstract mathematics.

From 1937 to 1939 Dantzig worked as a statistician in Washington. Then he began again doctoral studies at the University of California Berkeley, which, however, he interrupted again for the occurrence of the United States into the Second World War. He entered the Air Force, where he 1941-1946 Head of the Combat Analysis Branch, USAF Headquarters Statistical Control was. In 1944 he was awarded the War Department Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in recognition.

In 1946 he again took on his studies and received his doctorate. He then worked as a mathematical consultant at the Ministry of Defense, where in 1947 he published the simplex method.

1952 moved to Dantzig RAND Corporation, where he was largely responsible for implementing linear programming on computers. In 1960 he accepted a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley and then moved in 1966 to a professorship Operations Research and Computer Science from Stanford University. In 1973 he was co-founder and first president of the Mathematical Programming Society ( MPS). According to him, the George B. Dantzig Prize of the SIAM - is named.

George Dantzig died on 13 May 2005 in Palo Alto at the consequences of his diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Services

His most significant scientific contribution is the developed of him simplex method. He was also one of the founders of the stochastic and integer programming as well as co-developer of the Dantzig -Wolfe decomposition in 1959 / 60th All of these methods and their generalizations are now playing a major role in the practical application of mathematical optimization.

An event in 1939 during Dantzigs studies in Berkeley later led to the legend. As Dantzig once came into a lecture of Professor Jerzy Neyman later, stood at the blackboard two famous unproven conjecture from the statistics. Dantzig she held for a homework assignment and wrote them yourself. Although he was " a little heavier than usual " found the tasks, he broke them and gave the solutions a few days later with Professor Neyman from. Six weeks after the latter told him that he had prepared a Dantzigs of solutions to be published in a mathematical journal. In 1950 Abraham Wald was preparing to publish a notice in the journal Annals of Mathematical Statistics, which should provide a solution to the second problem. When he learned that Dantzig had the problem already solved, but not yet published, he wore it just a co-author. The story was later processed with Dantzigs permission in a book about positive thinking and disseminated by it. Over time details have been changed and modified names, so that the legend is circulating in different versions.

Awards

Among other things, Dantzig received the 1975 John von Neumann Theory Prize first for his work in the field of linear programming, the National Medal of Science in 1976 and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis 1977. The first issue of the SIAM Journal on Optimization in 1991 was George Dantzig dedicated.

Writings

• On the non -existence of tests of " Student's " hypothesis having power functions independent of σ. In: Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Baltimore 11.1940,2, p.186 - 192nd ISSN 0003-4851
• Linear programming and extensions. Springer, Berlin 1966.
• Linear inequalities and related systems. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton NJ 1966.
• George Dantzig, A. Aziz: Lectures in differential equations. VanNostrand Reinhold Co., New York 1969.
• George Dantzig, T. Saaty: Compact city. Freeman, San Francisco 1973.
• George Bernard Dantzig, B. Curtis Eaves: Studies in optimization. Mathematical Association of America, Washington 1974. ISBN 0-88385-110-5
• George Dantzig, M. Thapa. Linear programming, Volume 1: Introduction. Springer - Verlag, New York 1997. ISBN 0387948333
• George Dantzig, M. Thapa. Linear programming, Volume 2: Theory and Extensions. Springer - Verlag, New York, 2003. ISBN 0387986138