Jack Edmonds

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Jack R. Edmonds is a mathematician, regarded as one of the most important contributors to the field of combinatorial optimization. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.

From 1969 on, with the exception of 1991-1993, he held a faculty position at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics. Edmonds retired in 1999.

From 1991 to 1993, he was involved in a dispute ("the Edmonds affair")[1] with the University of Waterloo. The university claimed he had resigned, but he denied it. The conflict was resolved in 1993, and he returned to the university.

The Fifth Aussois Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization in 2001 was dedicated to Jack Edmonds.

Edmonds' matching algorithm and the research paper which describes this algorithm is one of the most cited papers. The Edmonds-Gallai decomposition theorem describes finite graphs from the point of view of matchings.

He introduced polymatroids, blockers and cutters.

His son, Jeff Edmonds, is a Professor of Computer Science at York University in Canada.

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