Frank Lauren Hitchcock

Frank Lauren Hitchcock was an American mathematician and physicist, born in New York City on 6 March 1875 and raised in Pittsford, Vermont. He graduated from Harvard University in 1896, taught in Paris, at Kenyon College and at North Dakota State University, and then joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he stayed until retirement. He earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1910 with a thesis titled Vector Functions of a Point. He is remembered for formulating the transportation problem in 1941 in a paper on the distribution of a product from several sources to numerous localities, a problem later developed in linear programming and operations research. Earlier he published on vector and tensor analysis, on thermodynamics of electrolytic solutions and on integral equations, including joint work with Norbert Wiener. He died on 31 May 1957.