Václav Chvátal

Vasek Chvátal ( born July 20, 1946 in Prague ) is a Czech- Canadian mathematician who works mainly in the linear and integer programming as well as graph-theoretical problems. He has authored several important works to perfect graph, the Hamiltonian path problem and the problem of the traveling salesman and a standard work on linear optimization.

Chvátal earned his degree in mathematics in 1968 and left right then Czechoslovakia, Soviet troops invaded there and the Prague Spring to an end prepared. After a short stay in Austria, where he financed through odd jobs, he moved to the University of New Brunswick in eastern Canada and then to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where he earned his doctoral degree. In the 1970s, he worked at various universities, including at the Université de Montréal and at Stanford. During the next 15 years at Rutgers University, he has authored numerous important articles and conducted research with David Applegate, Robert Bixby and William Cook on the problem of the traveling salesman. Today he is a professor of combinatorial optimization at Concordia University in Montreal.

From Chvatal the solution of the problem of the museum guard comes.

In 2007 he received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize - with Bixby, Applegate and Cook for her book about the problem of the traveling salesman.