Like a fictional character in the film "Good Will Hunting," the young George Dantzig once solved a problem on a blackboard that had stumped veteran mathematicians.
As a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley in 1939, Dantzig arrived late to class one day and copied two problems from a blackboard. After struggling with what he thought was a difficult homework assignment, he submitted his work to the eminent statistician Jerzy Neyman. Six weeks later on a Sunday at 8 AM, Neyman excitedly awoke Dantzig to say he had written an introduction to Dantzig's paper. It turned out that Dantzig had found solutions to two famous, previously unsolved statistical problems.
George B. Dantzig is considered the father of linear programming and a founder of operations research. In 1947, he recognized that a broad and important class of planning and operational problems that continually arise in the public and private sectors can be stated mathematically in a new form that he termed a linear program. His results and a computational procedure called the simplex method for the first time enabled governmental and industrial managers to structure and solve extremely complex resource problems. The development of these methods coincided with the appearance of the first computers and led to an explosion in applications that managers could use to compare large numbers of independent courses of action.
A mentor to generations of mathematicians, Dr. Dantzig has received copious honors, including the National Medal of Science in 1975. His disciples have argued that he should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
INFORMS will hold its national convention at the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel from Sunday, November 7 to Wednesday, November 10. The theme is "ORMS and the Quality of Life." Additional information about the conference, including a full list of workshops, is at http://www2.informs.org/Conf/Philadelphia99/ and http://www2.informs.org/Press.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.