Leonid Gendrichowitsch Chatschijan

Leonid Gendrichowitsch Chatschijan ( Armenian : Լեոնիդ Գենրիխովիչ Խաչիյան; Russian Леонид Генрихович Хачиян ; English: Leonid Khachiyan ; born May 3, 1952 in Leningrad ; † April 29, 2005 in South Brunswick , New Jersey , USA ) was a mathematician who last worked at the Rutgers University in New Jersey taught. His most important achievement was the development of the first polynomial method for solving linear optimization problems using the ellipsoid method in 1979 . Although this method was not suitable for practical use, it provided the basic idea for many randomized algorithms in convex optimization and was thus an important theoretical result.

Life

Khachyan was born in Leningrad into a family of Armenian descent with whom he moved to Moscow at the age of nine . After studying at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he received a doctorate in computer-oriented mathematics and computer science there in 1978 and 1984 . He then spent a few years as a research assistant in research and teaching at the same institute. In 1982 he won the prestigious Fulkerson Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society for important publications in the field of discrete mathematics .

A few years later, in 1989, Khachiyan went to the Cornell University Institute of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering as a visiting professor in New York . A year later he moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he expanded his work on convex optimization problems . In addition, together with Bahman Kalantari, he published a series of articles on the scaling and balancing of matrices and worked on approximations for multi-commodity flows as well as on matrix games and decomposition techniques for special convex optimization problems. In 2000, Khachiyan became a US citizen.

In 2005 Leonid Khachiyan died unexpectedly of a heart attack . He left behind his wife Olga Pischikova Reynberg and his two daughters Anna and Nina.

In 1983 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw ( Convexity and complexity in polynomial programming ).

Web links

• Obituary in the SIAM News (English.)