Dantzig, George

George Dantzig, (born Nov. 8, 1914, Portland, Ore., U.S.—died May 13, 2005, Stanford, Calif.), American mathematician who devised the simplex method, an algorithm for solving problems that involve numerous conditions and variables, and in the process founded the field of linear programming.

Dantzig earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Maryland (1936) and a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan (1937) before joining the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as a statistician. In 1939 he entered the graduate mathematics program at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1941 to 1946 Dantzig was the civilian head of the Combat Analysis Branch of the U.S. Army Air Forces Office of Statistical Control. In 1946 he returned for one semester to Berkeley to receive a doctorate in mathematics, and then he went back to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. Department of Defense.

While working on allocation of resources (materials and personnel) for various projects and deployments of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Dantzig invented (1947) the simplex algorithm for optimization. At that time such scheduling was called programming, and it soon became apparent that the simplex algorithm was ideal for translating formerly intractable problems involving hundreds, or even thousands, of factors for solution by the recently invented computer. From 1952 to 1960 he was a research mathematician at the RAND Corporation, where he helped develop the field of operations research (essentially, the application of computers to optimization problems). From 1960 to 1966 he served as chairman of the Operations Research Center at Berkeley, and from 1966 until his retirement in 1997 he was a professor of operations research and computer science at Stanford University.

Among Dantzig’s numerous awards were the John von Neumann Theory Prize in operations research (1975), the National Medal of Science (1975), and the National Academy of Sciences Award in applied mathematics and numerical analysis (1977).