George Dantzig, 90; Created Linear Programming
George B. Dantzig, the mathematician who invented the field of linear programming, which revolutionized the way government and private enterprise planned, scheduled and generally conducted their business, has died. He was 90.
A professor emeritus at Stanford, Dantzig died May 13 at his home in Palo Alto. He had been in failing health, with diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
The scholar developed linear programming -- in essence, a decision-support tool that is ideal for resource allocation -- while working for the Defense Department after World War II.
As BusinessWeek reported some years ago, “Dantzig’s idea was to develop a mathematical model that includes all of the variables of any given manufacturing, scheduling or distribution scenario. With all the pertinent data in place, a linear program computes the most efficient, lowest-cost way to achieve the desired objective.”
About the same time, he invented the “simplex method,” an algorithm for solving linear programming problems.
“The virtually simultaneous development of linear programming and computers led to an explosion of applications, especially in the industrial sector,” Arthur F. Veinott Jr., a Stanford professor, said in a statement.
By the early 1950s, private enterprise -- initially petroleum companies -- had started using Dantzig’s methods.
“They started out with the simple problem of how to blend the gasoline for the right flash point, the right viscosity and the right octane and try to do it in the cheapest way possible,” Dantzig told Computerworld magazine some years ago.
In addition to blending gasoline, oil companies used linear programming in computers to schedule tanker fleets, design port facilities and create financial models. Shipping companies employed the concept to determine truck and plane scheduling.
Eventually linear programming came to be used in everything from manufacturing to diet planning.
George Bernard Dantzig was born in Portland, Ore., on Nov. 8, 1914. His father was Tobias Dantzig, a prominent Latvian mathematician who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and married before immigrating with his wife to the United States in 1909.
George Dantzig showed an early interest in mathematics, especially geometry, and studied at the University of Maryland, where his father was a professor.
Dantzig earned his master’s degree at the University of Michigan and, after two years of work at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, enrolled in a PhD program at UC Berkeley.
At the outset of World War II, he left to become chief of the combat analysis branch of the Army Air Forces. He later said his mission was to help create order in aircraft-supply flow lines.
“Everything was planned in the greatest detail: all the nuts and bolts, the procurement of airplanes, the detailed manufacture of everything,” Dantzig said. “There were hundreds of thousands of different kinds of material goods and perhaps 50,000 specialties of people.”
In 1944, he received the War Department’s Exceptional Civilian Service Medal for his efforts.
After the war, he returned to Berkeley and finished his PhD work, continuing his studies with mathematician Jerzy Neyman. Their relationship became legend in the math world.
“During my first year at Berkeley, I arrived late one day to one of Neyman’s classes,” Dantzig recalled years later. “On the blackboard were two problems, which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down.
“A few days later,” he said, “I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework -- the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than the usual. He told me to throw [the homework] on his desk.”
Early one morning about six weeks later, Dantzig found Neyman banging excitedly on the front door of his apartment. What Dantzig had copied off the blackboard was not homework but examples of two famous unsolved problems in statistics.
Dantzig had solved one, and Neyman wanted to send out one of his papers for immediate publication.
After earning his doctorate, Dantzig returned to Washington to work for what had by then become the Air Force. His job was mechanizing the planning process. It was during this period that he discovered that linear programs could be used to solve a wide array of planning issues.
His creation of the simplex method and the development of the modern use of computer research made complicated equations much easier and faster to solve. For instance, they allowed industry to quickly compare the several factors involved in interdependent courses of action.
In the early 1950s, Dantzig started working for Rand Corp., where he played a major role in developing the new discipline of operations research using linear programming.
He returned to academia in 1960, as chairman of the Operations Research Center at UC Berkeley. Six years later he moved on to Stanford as professor of operations research and computer science. He retired in 1997.
Over the years, he wrote or co-wrote several influential books, including “Linear Programming and Extensions” (1963) and “Compact City” (1973).
He was awarded the National Science Medal in 1975.
Dantzig is survived by his wife, Anne; three children; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
