Ellis L. Johnson

Ellis Lane Johnson ( born July 26, 1938 in Athens ( Georgia)) is an American computer scientist and mathematician Applied ( Operations Research ).

Johnson grew up on a farm (and later he went to a farm near Madison (Georgia ) to ). He studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in 1960 and at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 where he made ​​his master's degree and was awarded his doctorate in 1965 George B. Dantzig (Network Flows, Graphs and Integer Programming ). 1964 to 1968 he was assistant professor of economics at Yale University. Following a sabbatical stay at the ETH Zurich, he wanted to get back into research. From 1968 he worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM, where he remained until 1993. The appointment as IBM Fellow in 1990 allowed him five years of research of your own choice. He went to Georgia Institute of Technology, where he established a center for optimization with George Nemhauser. In 1995, he left IBM and joined the faculty on a sponsored by Coca Cola Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He taught as part of his professorship at Georgia Tech in Shanghai.

He is known for his contributions to Integer Programming, where he worked in the 1970s with Ralph E. Gomory. With Jack Edmonds, he solved the postman problem (Chinese Postman Problem ) with matching methods. They showed that it is solvable in polynomial time ( in contrast to the seemingly similar, but far more difficult problem of a Salesman ).

1972-1978 was next Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo.

In 1985 he received the Dantzig Prize, 1983 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize - and in 2000 the John von Neumann Theory Prize. In 1980, he received a U.S. Senior Scientist Award from the Humboldt Foundation and was with this promotion in 1980/81 at the University of Bonn.

In 1990, he was IBM Fellow. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.