George Dantzig

George Bernard Dantzig (8 November 1914 to 13 May 2005) was an American mathematical scientist who contributed to industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics and statistics. He is best known for developing the simplex algorithm for solving linear programming problems and for his wider work on linear programming. Born in Portland, Oregon, to a mathematician father and a linguist mother, he took his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland in 1936 and a master's degree at Michigan in 1937, then studied statistics under Jerzy Neyman at Berkeley. In 1939 he solved two open problems in statistical theory after mistaking them for homework, a story that became a classroom legend. During the Second World War he headed the combat analysis branch of the Army Air Forces statistical control office, and he completed his Berkeley doctorate in 1946. He worked at the RAND Corporation, founded the Operations Research Center at Berkeley and from 1966 taught at Stanford, where he founded the Systems Optimization Laboratory. He received the first John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1974 and the National Medal of Science in 1975.