George Bernard Dantzig (1914-2005) was a distinguished mathematician, whose personality and work greatly impacted many scientists and research institutions, including IIASA.

Professor Dantzig is perhaps best known as the inventor of the simplex method of solving linear programs. However, his achievements in mathematics and operational research are much broader, and contributed immensely to the development of modern computational science that includes all methods of scientific computing. He excelled already as a graduate student of Jerzy Neyman after struggling over six weeks with what he thought was a difficult homework assignment; in reality, he had found solutions to two famous, previously unsolved statistical problems.

George Dantzig was deeply engaged in the development of new mathematical methods for solving practical problems. Beginning with his work during World War II on the scheduling of large enterprises, he expanded to a wide range of applications including: water resource planning, transport system operations, petroleum and gas distribution, medical diagnosis, chemical equilibrium analysis, energy policy planning, ecology, farm management, manpower planning, and machine scheduling. The corresponding mathematical problems included new types of optimization models with many more variables than considered before. Naturally, everything is relative, and today we consider problems with many more variables than at that time; but George Dantzig has shown that we need both, new concepts of algorithmic procedures and new computing tools for solving such problems. Moreover, he was probably the first who spelled-out not only the opportunities but also the limitations of using large-scale models for policy making.

His introduced the concept of an objective function into quantitative planning, and formulated the linear programming, a general problem of optimizing a linear objective with linear constraints. The algorithmic method for solving such problems, called the simplex method, was introduced in his publication in 1947, with many later extensions such as integer programming, mixed integer-linear programming, nonlinear programming (or optimization), multi-stage stochastic optimization. It was he who coined (1947) the term programming in research. This word was used by him earlier to denote the algorithmic procedures of optimization done on mechanical calculators before computers were available. Since the 1950s this word denotes programming a computer or creating software. Linear programming computations constituted a large part of the tasks of early computers, as they still do in a vast variety of applications. These applications have proved the immense potential of digital computers and thus helped to found the field called computational science. Over six decades he made many key contributions to the development of mathematical programming, which has proven to be a methodology of fundamental importance to applied systems analysis.

George Dantzig, a long time Stanford University professor, also set the directions of the methodological work at IIASA. During the first months of the Institute's scientific activities in 1973-1974 he established the Methodology Project and, with it, the tradition, which continues today, of a close collaboration between the methodologists and those working on applied problems. Later he visited IIASA many times each time greatly contributing to IIASA's activities. The standards of excellence that he brought to the Institute have remained guiding the methodological work. His scientific contributions are partly documented in numerous publications; thus let us mention the two less known benefits resulting from his vision and wisdom. First, in the late 1970s he helped with setting up the IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) that continues to be one of the most successful IIASA activities ever. Second, as the first speaker in the IIASA Distinguished Lecture Series, he discussed in June 1979 the role of models in determining policy for transition to a more resilient technological society. This talk summarized not only the opportunities but also the limitations of using standard models to support policy making; the latter provided motivation for long-term research on new approaches to model-based support for decision making.

For decades many researchers all over the world have been benefiting from the great legacy of Dantzig's research, often unconsciously. Some were lucky enough to work with him, or at least to meet him; those will certainly remember his personality, diversified discussions, and jokes he often told about himself too. He also used every opportunity to disseminate knowledge. For example, during his time at IIASA George always drank his soup out of a beer mug. When asked why he wrote out a mathematical formula proving that less heat is wasted using a beer mug, than a soup bowl. He was known to always have time for his students and colleagues, even when he worked 90 to 100 hours a week. His personal warmth and willingness to help have served as a model for those who had closer contact with him.

Professor Dantzig's work exemplifies the ideal of methodological advancement combined with applicability toward which IIASA continues to strive. His book "Linear Programming and Extensions" (1963) remains one of fundamental texts in mathematical programming. The book starts with the sentence: "The final test of a theory is its capacity to solve the problems which originated it." We should remember both this advice, and the other knowledge he shared with us over the years.

More information about Professor Dantzig's distinguished career can be found in EurekAlert.

Responsible for this page: Marek Makowski
Last updated: 24 Feb 2011