Andrew Vazsonyi

Andrew Vázsonyi, born Endre Weiszfeld in Budapest in 1916, was a Hungarian mathematician and operations researcher who also worked under the playful pen name Zepartzatt Gozinto. As a teenager he befriended Paul Erdős and began work on the geometric median problem, whose iterative solution is still known as Weiszfeld's algorithm and remains widely used because it is simple and converges quickly. He took his doctorate at the university in Budapest under Lipót Fejér, changed his name in 1937 to escape discrimination, and reached the United States in 1940. After studying mechanical engineering at Harvard he worked on missile design and guidance, then moved into management science at Hughes Aircraft. In 1953 he helped found The Institute of Management Sciences, and he later taught business at several universities. A conjecture of his was the origin of Kruskal's tree theorem. He died in Santa Rosa, California, in 2003.