George Dantzig

George Bernard Dantzig ; November 8, 1914 – May 13, 2005 was an American mathematical scientist who presentation contributions to industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics.

Dantzig is required for his development of a simplex algorithm, an algorithm for solving linear programming problems, as alive as for his other name with linear programming. In statistics, Dantzig solved two open problems in statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework after arriving behind to a lecture by Jerzy Neyman.

At his death, Dantzig was the Professor Emeritus of Transportation Sciences as well as Professor of Operations Research and of computer Science at Stanford University.

Career

With the outbreak of World War II, Dantzig took a leave of absence from the doctoral script at Berkeley to earn as a civilian for the United States Army Air Forces. From 1941 to 1946, he became the head of the combat analysis branch of the Headquarters Statistical authority for the Army Air Forces. In 1946, he forwarded to Berkeley to ready the specification of his script and received his Ph.D. that year. Although he had a faculty offer from Berkeley, he target to the Air Force as mathematical advisor to the comptroller.

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 managed the Methodology combine 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 University.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dantzig was the recipient of numerous honors, including the first John von Neumann picture Prize in 1974, the National Medal of Science in 1975, an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1976. The Mathematical Programming Society honored Dantzig by creating the George B. Dantzig Prize, bestowed every three years since 1982 on one or two people who have delivered a significant affect in the field of mathematical programming. He was elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the management Sciences.

Freund wrote further that "through his research in mathematical theory, computation, economic analysis, and application to industrial problems, Dantzig contributed more than any other researcher to the remarkable development of linear programming".

Dantzig's work lets the airline industry, for example, to plan crews and make fleet assignments. Based on his work tools are developed "that shipping companies use to established how numerous planes they need and where their delivery trucks should be deployed. The oil industry long has used linear programming in refinery planning, as it determines how much of its raw product should make different grades of gasoline and how much should be used for petroleum-based byproducts. it is for used in manufacturing, revenue management, telecommunications, advertising, architecture, circuit array and countless other areas".

Linear programming is a mathematical method for establish a way tothe best outcome such as maximum profit or lowest constitute in a given mathematical model for some list of requirements represented as linear relationships. Linear programming arose as a mathematical good example developed during World War II to plan expenditures and returns in grouping to reduce costs to the army and include losses to the enemy. It was kept secret until 1947. Postwar, many industries found its use in their daily planning.

The founders of this subject are Leonid Kantorovich, a Russian mathematician who developed linear programming problems in 1939, Dantzig, who published the simplex method in 1947, and John von Neumann, who developed the theory of the duality in the same year.

Dantzig was so-called to work out a method the Air Force could use to news that updates your information their planning process. This led to his original example of finding the best assignment of 70 people to 70 jobs showing the benefit of linear programming. The computing power to direct or determine required to test any the permutations tothe best assignment is vast; the number of possible configurations exceeds the number of particles in the universe. However, it takes only ato find the optimum calculation by posing the problem as a linear program and applying the Simplex algorithm. The theory behind linear programming drastically reduces the number of possible optimal solutions that must be checked.

In 1963, Dantzig's Linear Programming and Extensions was published by Princeton University Press. Rich in insight and coverage of significant topics, the book quickly became "the bible" of linear programming.