Gyula Farkas

Gyula Farkas (1847 to 1930) was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who worked on linear inequalities, linear programming and mechanical equilibrium. Born at Sárosd in Fejér county, he was schooled by the Benedictines at Győr, abandoned plans to study law and music at Pest, and later taught at Székesfehérvár before tutoring the children of Count Géza Batthyany, whose private physics laboratory gave him room for research. By 1880 he had published in the Comptes Rendus and became a lecturer in function theory at the university in Pest. In 1887 he moved to the University of Kolozsvár, where he became ordinary professor, then dean and rector, and he served there until failing eyesight led him to retire in 1915. He is remembered for the Farkas theorem on systems of linear inequalities, which is used in linear programming, for a convergence study of Bolyai's iterative solution of the trinomial equation, and for thermodynamic work that reached the principle later credited to Caratheodory some years before Caratheodory.