George Dantzig

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George B. Dantzig with Gerald Ford receiving the National Medal of Science in 1976

George Bernard Dantzig (born November 8, 1914 in Portland , Oregon , † May 13, 2005 in Stanford , California ) was an American mathematician . He is considered the father of linear optimization , a branch of operations research . He was best known for the simplex process he developed .

Life

Dantzig attended Powell Junior High School in Washington, DC , where he achieved excellent grades thanks to his father's encouragement and personal motivation after initially sluggish progress in mathematics . This development continued in Central High School, where he was particularly interested in geometry . He was mainly supported by a math teacher, a school friend and later math professor at the University of California, Berkeley , and his father Tobias, who had worked for Henri Poincaré in Paris .

Dantzig studied mathematics at the University of Maryland because his parents could not finance him at a more prestigious university. In 1936 he earned a BA in mathematics and physics . Also that year he married Anne Shmuner, moved to Ann Arbor and began postgraduate studies at the University of Michigan with the aim of doing a doctorate . He finished this in 1937 with an MA in mathematics. Initially, he did not go on to do a doctorate because abstract mathematics was not his thing.

From 1937 to 1939 Dantzig worked as a statistician in Washington. He then began again to study for a doctorate at the University of California Berkeley, which he interrupted again because of the entry of the United States into the Second World War . He joined the Air Force , where he was head of the Combat Analysis Branch, USAF Headquarters Statistical Control from 1941 to 1946 . In 1944 he received the War Department Exceptional Civilian Service Medal as an award.

In 1946 he resumed his studies and did his doctorate with Jerzy Neyman with the dissertation: I. Complete Form Neyman-Pearson Fundamental Lemma. II. On the Non-Existence of Tests of Student's Hypothesis Having Power Functions Independent of Sigma. He then worked as a mathematical advisor at the Ministry of Defense , where he published the simplex method in 1947 .

In 1952 Dantzig moved to the RAND Corporation , where he was largely responsible for implementing linear programming on computers . In 1960 he accepted a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley and then switched to a professorship in Operations Research and Computer Science at Stanford University in 1966 . In 1973 he was a co-founder and first president of the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS). After him is George B. Dantzig Prize- the SIAM named.

George Dantzig died on May 13, 2005 in Palo Alto of complications from diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Services

His most important scientific contribution is the simplex method he developed . He was also one of the founders of stochastic and integer optimization and co-developer of the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition in 1959/60. All these procedures and their generalizations play a major role in the practical application of mathematical optimization today .

An event in 1939 during Dantzig's college days at Berkeley later led to the making of legend. When Dantzig later came to a lecture by Professor Jerzy Neyman , there were two well-known unproven assumptions from statistics on the blackboard . Dantzig thought it was homework and wrote it down. Although he found the tasks “a little harder than usual”, he solved them and handed the solutions over to Professor Neyman a few days later. Six weeks later, he told him that he had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. In 1950, Abraham Wald prepared a publication in the journal Annals of Mathematical Statistics that would provide a solution to the second problem. When he found out that Dantzig had already solved the problem but not yet published it, he simply entered him as a co-author. The story was later incorporated into a book on positive thinking, with Dantzig's permission, and thereby circulated. In the course of time, details have been changed and names have changed so that the legend circulates in different versions.

Awards

In 1971 Dantzig was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1975 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Among other things, he received the first John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1975 for his work in the field of linear programming , the National Medal of Science in 1976 and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis in 1977. The first issue of the SIAM Journal on Optimization 1991 was dedicated to George Dantzig.

Fonts

  • On the non-existence of tests of "Student's" hypothesis having power functions independent of σ. in: Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Baltimore 11.1940,2, pp. 186-192. ISSN  0003-4851 .
  • Linear programming and extensions. Springer, Berlin 1966.
  • Linear inequalities and related systems. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton NJ 1966.
  • George Dantzig, A. Aziz: Lectures in differential equations. VanNostrand Reinhold Co., New York 1969.
  • George Dantzig, T. Saaty: Compact city. Freeman, San Francisco 1973.
  • George Bernard Dantzig, B Curtis Eaves: Studies in optimization. Mathematical Association of America, Washington 1974. ISBN 0-88385-110-5 .
  • George Dantzig, M. Thapa: Linear programming. Volume 1: Introduction. Springer-Verlag, New York 1997. ISBN 0387948333 .
  • George Dantzig, M. Thapa: Linear programming. Volume 2: Theory and Extensions. Springer-Verlag, New York 2003. ISBN 0387986138 .

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson, Constance Reid More Mathematical People - Contemporary Conversations , Academic Press 1994

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The unsolvable math problem- snopes.com
personal data
SURNAME Dantzig, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dantzig, George Bernard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Portland , Oregon , United States
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 2005
Place of death Stanford , California , United States