Mathwar/Personlist/Dantzig George
George Dantzig
(* November 8th 1914, † May 13th 2005
George Dantzig is known as the father of linear programming and as the inventor of the "simplex method," an algorithm for solving linear programming problems.
Life
George Dantzig earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Maryland in 1936, his master's degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1938. After a two-year period at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he enrolled in the doctoral program in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley studying statistics under mathematician Jerzy Neyman. In 1939, he arrived late to his statistics class. Seeing two problems written on the board, he assumed they were a homework assignment and copied them down, solved them and handed them in a few days later. Unbeknownst to him, they were examples of (formerly) unproved statistical theorems. Dantzig's story became the stuff of legend, and was the inspiration for the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting.
With the outbreak of World War II, George took a leave of absence from the doctoral program at Berkeley to join the U.S. Air Force Office of Statistical Control. In 1946, he returned to Berkeley to complete the requirements of his program and received his Ph.D. that year.
In 1952 Dantzig joined the mathematics division of the RAND Corporation. By 1960 he became a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, where he founded and directed the Operations Research Center. In 1966 he joined the Stanford faculty as Professor of Operations Research and of Computer Science. A year later, the Program in Operations Research became a full-fledged department. In 1973 he founded the Systems Optimization Laboratory (SOL) there. On a sabbatical leave that year, he headed the Methodology Group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Later he became the C. A. Criley Professor of Transportation Sciences at Stanford, and kept going, well beyond his mandatory retirement in 1985.