Eugene Lawler

Eugene Lawler (* 1933, † 2 September 1994 ) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer and computer scientist who is one of the founders of combinatorial optimization.

Life and work

Eugene Lawler grew up in Evanston (Illinois ) and studied at Florida State University ( Bachelor in Mathematics 1954) and Harvard (Master 1957). 1959 to 1961 he was an electrical engineer at Sylvania Electric Products in Needham, Massachusetts. In 1962 he went back to Harvard, where he received his doctorate in 1963 under Anthony Oettinger ( "Some Aspects of Discrete Mathematical Programming "). After that, he was in 1962 at the University of Michigan, where he was professor of electrical engineering. From 1971 he was a professor at Berkeley, where he retired in 1994.

Lawler dealt with combinatorial optimization and specifically scheduling and branch and bound method. From 1990 he turned increasingly to the computer science applications in biochemistry in the context of large sequencing projects.

Eugene Lawler was known for his interdisciplinary commitment regarding the interaction of computers and society ( of which he held a much-visited course in Berkeley ). Therefore, from the ACM in his honor a Eugene Lawler prize is awarded. He became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1992.

His doctoral counts David Shmoys.

Writings

  • Selected Publications of Eugene Lawler, Amsterdam 1999
  • Combinatorial Optimization: Networks and matroid, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976
  • Jan Karel Lenstra, Alexander Rinnooy Kan, David Shmoys: The traveling salesman problem - a guided tour of combinatorial optimization, Wiley 1985
  • With David Wood, " Branch and bound methods - a survey", Operations Research Bd.14, 1966, S.699 -719
September 2 Evanston (Illinois) Harvard University Needham (Massachusetts) Association for Computing Machinery Mathematics Genealogy Project
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