Egon Balas

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Egon Balas (2014)

Egon Balas (born June 7, 1922 in Cluj-Napoca ; † March 18, 2019 ) was a Romanian mathematician .

Life

He grew up as the eldest son of Ignác (Ignatius) Blatt and his wife Boriska (Barbara) Blatt, b. Hirsch, in a Hungarian-Jewish family. After graduating from high school in 1941 in the city, which had meanwhile been ceded to Hungary , he was denied studying physics and mathematics. At this time Egon Balas also joined the Hungarian Communist Party . When he was drafted at the age of 21, he went underground on the advice of the party. He worked for the party under different names and identities until he was arrested and tortured by counterintelligence in August 1944.

His father died in the Hungarian labor service . In 1944, his younger brother Robert and his mother were deported to Auschwitz . As a member of a camp orchestra , the brother survived until he was killed on a death march during the evacuation of the camp . The mother was murdered near the Stutthof concentration camp . In October of the same year Egon Balas was sentenced to 14 years in prison. However, a few months later he managed to escape. He was liberated by the Red Army in March 1945 .

After 1945 Egon Balázs plunged into political development work and began studying economics at the Bolyai University in Cluj in 1946 , which he graduated in 1949.

In November 1946 he met his future wife Edith Lövi, a young Auschwitz survivor. In 1947 Balas was transferred to the agricultural department of the party's central committee, but in January 1948 he was reassigned to the role of secretary of the Romanian legation in London . He changed his name again. After their marriage in 1949, Balas also brought Edith to London, but was declared persona non grata and expelled only weeks later .

On his return to Romania, he became head of the Economic Affairs Directorate in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, taught economics, lost his job and home in 1952, was arrested and tortured again. In 1954, Balas was released. He published articles in the business journal Problems Economice on the relationship between the manufacture of manufactured goods and consumer goods and began to be interested in mathematics at the age of 32. He dealt with linear programming and used his knowledge at a new job, a planning and research institute for forestry and the wood industry. In the private apartment of the mathematician Grigore Moisil , a member of the Academy of Sciences, he rolled over linear problems and learned operations research .

In 1962 he entered the international arena in mathematics: Balas published “On the Transportation Problem. Part I - Part II ”in the Cahiers du Center d'études de recherche opérationnelle . Shortly afterwards, in forestry planning, he encountered mixed integer optimization problems for the first time , the solution of which must be integer in some components. He developed his own method to deal with it algorithmically and published it in 1965 in the journal Operations Research under the title "An Additive Algorithm for Solving Linear Programs with Zero-One Variables".

In 1966 Balas moved with his family to Naples and received a research grant at the International Computing Center in Rome with Claude Berge . In 1967 Balas received a doctorate in economics and a year later in mathematics. In 1967 he conducted research at Stanford University with George Dantzig , one of the inventors of linear optimization.

In the fall of 1967 his family moved to Pittsburgh , where Balas has since been researching at Carnegie Mellon University ; his wife taught art history there. Balas developed the "disjunctive programming", lift-and-project and - in 1980 as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Cologne - a method for using extended formulations and projections of polyhedra in optimization.

In 2001, Balas received the EURO Gold Medal from the Association of European Operational Research Societies. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as well as honorary doctorates from the University of Waterloo and the University of Miguel Hernández Elche .

Works (excerpt)

  • An Additive Algorithm for Solving Linear Programs with Zero-One Variables . Operations Research, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1965, pp. 517-549.

literature

  • Egon Balas: The will to freedom. A dangerous journey through fascism and communism. Springer, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-23920-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Remembering Egon Balas. Carnegie Mellon University, March 19, 2019, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Egon Balas: The will to freedom. A dangerous journey through fascism and communism. Springer, Berlin 2011, pp. 45ff.
  3. ^ The two orthogonal lives of Egon Balas (PDF; 61 kB), Andreas Loos: The two orthogonal lives of Egon Balas, accessed on June 19, 2012, p. 3.
  4. ↑ Egon Balas: The will to freedom. A dangerous journey through fascism and communism. Springer, Berlin 2011, p. 334.
  5. ↑ The two orthogonal lives of Egon Balas (PDF; 61 kB), Andreas Loos: The two orthogonal lives of Egon Balas, accessed on June 19, 2012, p. 4.
  6. ↑ EURO Gold Medal Laureates. European Association for Operations Research Societies, accessed June 18, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Balas, Egon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blatt, Egon; Balázs, Egon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Cluj-Napoca
DATE OF DEATH 18th March 2019