George Dantzig

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George Bernard Dantzig (8 November 1914 – 13 May 2005) was an American mathematician who introduced the simplex algorithm and independently discovered linear programming some years after it was initially invented by Soviet economist and mathematician Leonid Kantorovich. He was the recipient of many honors, including the National Medal of Science in 1975, and the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1974.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He 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, and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1946. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland in 1976.

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[edit] Truth in urban legends

An event in Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous urban legend in 1939 while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for two, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, Dantzig received a visit from an excited professor Neyman, who had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. Years later another researcher, Abraham Wald, was preparing to publish a paper which arrived at a conclusion for the second problem, and included Dantzig as its co-author when he learned of the earlier solution.

This story began to spread, and was used as a motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Over time Dantzig's name was removed and facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend, and as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.


[edit] Other

The Mathematical Programming Society honored Dantzig by creating the Dantzig Award, bestowed every three years since 1982 on one or two people who have made a significant impact in the field of mathematical programming.

Dantzig died on May 13, 2005, in his home in Stanford, California, of complications from diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He was 90 years old.

His father, Tobias Dantzig, was a Russian mathematician who had studied with Henri Poincaré in Paris. Tobias married a fellow Sorbonne University student, Anja Ourisson, and the couple immigrated to the United States.

[edit] References

  • G. B. Dantzig 1940. On the non-existence of tests of "Student's" hypothesis having power functions independent of σ, Annals of Mathematical Statistics, Volume 11, number 2, pp186-192


[edit] External links

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