George Dantzig

George Dantzig's father was both a writer and a mathematician. He had hoped that his first son would be a writer and his second a mathematician, so he named his first son after the playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw and his second after Henri Poincare, a famous French mathematician under whom the father had studied. As it happened, both sons became mathematicians.

In 1939, George Dantzig was a graduate student at the University of California at Barkeley. One day he arrived late at statistic class. He copied the two problems that were written on the blackboard, assuming that they were homework problems. About sixt week after turning the homework in, he was awakened early one Sunday morning by his excited professor, who wanted to send off Dantzig's work right away for publication. The two problems were not homework but famous unsolved problems in statistics. Their solution became Dantzig's Ph.D. thesis in mathematics.



During world war II, Dantzig was hired by the Air Force to find practical ways to distribute men, weapons, and supplies to the various fronts. Shortly after the end of the war, he became mathematics advisor to the U.S. Air Force comptroller at the Pentagon, where he was responsible for finding a way to mechanize this planning process. The result was linear programming. The procedure was quickly applied to a wide variety of business, economic, and environmental topics. Tjalling Koopmans of the United States and Leonid Kantorovich of the Soviet Union received the 1975 Nobel Price in economics for their use of linear programming in developing the theory of allocation of resources. Surprisingly, Dantzig himself was not honored. He was professor at Stanford University. He passed away in 2005.