Christoph Witzgall
Christoph Johann Witzgall (* 1929 in Bavaria ) is a German-American applied mathematician.
Career
Witzgall studied at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he received his doctorate in 1958 with Wilhelm Maak with a dissertation on module functions (on return cuts on Riemann surfaces that belong to the main congruence subgroups of the module group) . In Munich he came into contact with Friedrich L. Bauer's group , who were then pioneers of computer science in Germany (development of Algol). The task of programming the simplex method was his entry into his future main research area, numerical analysis of optimization problems.
In 1959, at the invitation of Hans Maehly, he came to the Institute for Advanced Study , on whose computer a project of the Office of Naval Research to develop rational approximations for elementary transcendent functions for their calculation was running. Here he came into contact with some of the leading researchers in optimization, Harold Kuhn and Albert William Tucker . Back in Germany he was again in Bauer's group that was now in Mainz. Here he also met Josef Stoer , with whom he completed his book on optimization, which he had begun in Princeton and which appeared in the basic teaching series in 1971.
In 1961 he attended a summer optimization workshop at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica (organized by George Dantzig ) and was recruited by Jack Edmonds for the Operations Research group of the National Bureau of Standards, where he was from 1962. He worked on optimization problems for the US Post (further developing algorithms for the matching problem in graphs, in which Edmonds had recently achieved a breakthrough) and compared algorithms for shortest paths for a transport project (partly with Judith Gilsinn).
After his marriage, he moved to Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories (BSRL) in Seattle, whose mathematical research was directed by Burt Colvin and where he worked on scheduling problems for airlines, on the mass transit project of Morgantown (West Virginia) (with Fred Johnson ) and Transport Polytopes (with Victor Klee ) worked. In 1973 he followed Colvin to NIST ( National Institute of Standards and Technology ) and stayed there for the rest of his career. There he dealt with optimization tasks for local transport and large US authorities such as the US Post (for a planned e-mail system), and forecasts for energy consumption, for example for gas. After Alan Goldman left , he headed the department for three years from 1979. From 1986 he worked with the Topographical Engineering Center of the Army Corps of Engineers on the use of triangulation networks, for example to estimate excavated soil.
He has contributed to (numerical) optimization, operations research and algorithmic geometry.
Fonts
- with Josef Stoer : Convexity and Optimization in Finite Dimensions, Springer Verlag, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften 163, 1970
Web links
- NIST website, publications
- Biography of David Gilsinn, NIST, pdf (Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Volume 111, 2006, No. 2)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christoph Witzgall in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Witzgall, Christoph |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Witzgall, Christoph Johann (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-American applied mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1929 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bavaria |