Michel Balinski

Michel Louis Balinski (6 October 1933 to 4 February 2019) was an American and French applied mathematician, economist, operations research analyst and political scientist, born in Geneva. Educated in the United States, he earned his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton University in 1959 under Albert W. Tucker, taught at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the City University of New York and Yale, and from 1980 lived and worked in France, as a research director of the CNRS at the Ecole Polytechnique. He was known for work in optimisation, convex polyhedra, stable matching, and the theory and practice of electoral systems, jury decision and social choice. His 1961 result that the skeleton of an n-dimensional polytope is n-connected is called Balinski theorem. In 2013 INFORMS awarded him the John von Neumann Theory Prize.