Harold W. Kuhn

Harold William Kuhn (1925 to 2014) was an American mathematician who studied game theory and spent his career at Princeton University, where he became professor emeritus. He shared the 1980 John von Neumann Theory Prize with David Gale and Albert W. Tucker. His name is attached to the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions in optimization, to Kuhn's theorem and to Kuhn poker, a simplified poker game used to study equilibrium play. He described the Hungarian method for the assignment problem in 1955, although a paper by Carl Gustav Jacobi, published after his death in 1890 in Latin, was later found to have described the method a century earlier. Kuhn was a fellow graduate student, lifelong friend and colleague of John Forbes Nash, helped bring Nash to the attention of the Nobel Prize committee, co-edited The Essential John Nash and served as mathematics consultant on the film A Beautiful Mind. He was the third president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a Fellow of INFORMS from 2002. He supervised the Princeton doctoral work of Richard E. Stearns.