Delbert Ray Fulkerson
Delbert Ray Fulkerson (born August 14, 1924 in Tamms (Illinois) , † January 10, 1976 in Ithaca (New York) ) was an American mathematician. His best-known contribution was the co-development of the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm , one of the most widely used algorithms for calculating maximum flows in networks .
Fulkerson graduated from Southern Illinois University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1947, and received his master's degree in 1948 and his doctorate in mathematics in 1951 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison . From 1956 to 1971 he was in the mathematics department of the Rand Corporation and from 1971 professor at Cornell University ( Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Engineering and Professor of Operational Research and Applied Mathematics). He committed suicide.
He was visiting professor at Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Waterloo.
Fulkerson made significant advances in network flows, operations research, large-scale linear programming, and combinatorial optimization. In 1956 he published the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm together with Lester Randolph Ford junior . The renowned Fulkerson Prize is named after Delbert Fulkerson. It has been awarded every three years since 1979 by the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society for outstanding publications in discrete mathematics.
Also shortly before his death, Fulkerson came close to proving the weak conjecture for perfect graphs . But here László Lovász got ahead of him . Fulkerson had already started to assume that the assumption was incorrect and was looking for counterexamples. After learning of Lovasz's evidence, it only took him a short time to complete his old attempt at evidence.
In 1967 he received the Lester Randolph Ford Award for his work Flow Networks and Combinatorial Operational Research (American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 73, 1966, pp. 115-138)
literature
- LR Ford and DR Fulkerson: Flows in Networks. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1962.
Web links
- IFORS Operational Research Hall of Fame, Fulkerson
- Description of the Fulkerson Prize of the MPS (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Hoffman The man who only loved numbers , London 1998, p. 111
- ^ Ford, Fulkerson Maximum flow through a network . In: Canadian Journal of Mathematics, Volume 8, 1956, pp. 399-340
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fulkerson, Delbert Ray |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 14, 1924 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tamms, Illinois |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 10, 1976 |
| Place of death | Ithaca, New York |