The King is dead. George B. Dantzig is with us no more. And though we rejoice for all that he gave, we cannot help but weep as well.

In this magazine, in our journals, in our newspapers and our newsgroups, there will be many obituaries, eulogies, retrospectives and memorials for George, songs of praise, love and honor. He deserves them all.

Here's mine.

In 1986, I visited the Stanford Operations Research Department as a prospective graduate student. I was 21 years old, and my schedule included an afternoon meeting with The Man Who Invented Linear Programming. Unreal! My god, I was about to meet the central character from one of my textbooks. All day, I nervously awaited this appointment. Though I was awed at the prospect of being in the same room with him, he somehow immediately made me feel at ease. I have no idea what we talked about during that hour, but I can still remember him as he was that day — the face, the voice, the calm demeanor and the obvious sense of wonder and curiosity.

That night, recounting the events of the day, I could hardly contain my amazement at meeting the great GBD. "It's phenomenal," I gushed, "that this is the guy that came up with the Simplex Method!"

My host, one of George's Ph.D. students, replied matter-of-factly, "Well, it really wasn't that big a deal. All the mathematical pieces were basically in place already. If he hadn't come up with it, I'm sure someone else would have figured it out soon enough" [1].

I could hardly believe my ears. Such blasphemy!

I just didn't get it at the time — frankly, my host's lack of reverence for The Man was one of many things that bewildered me during that campus visit — but when I later got to know George, the lesson did become clear. Those who saw George every day did not treat him like some kind of demigod because, despite all of his amazing accomplishments, he didn't hold himself up on a pedestal. Ironically, George's remarkable (and totally genuine) humility ultimately endeared him to students, friends and colleagues even more deeply.

Linear Programming Class


I took his Linear Programming class during my first term as a graduate student. We all did. We came to his lectures, we read his book, and we heard the classic stories (his meeting with Johnny Von Neumann, the optimal diet that was very long on bouillon cubes, the Japanese lecture hall with the spare overhead projector bulb). We got to know him a little bit.

Meanwhile, I struggled with the material (I still don't really get some of those duality results!), I pestered George endlessly with dumb questions, and I harrumphed loudly when he didn't quite prove the theorems all that clearly on the board. Remarkably, George never laughed at my struggles, never expressed any irritation at my interruptions, and took my naïve algorithmic suggestions more seriously than I did ("That's worth looking into," he said, "and let me know what you find out...").

I cannot intelligently comment on the breadth and depth of George's technical work. For those interested in a more considered perspective on the Dantzig canon, a fine place to start is "The Basic George Dantzig" (edited by Richard Cottle and available online at www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=4834).

But I know enough now to be amazed and inspired by what I witnessed back then. During my years as a graduate student, George was in his mid-70s, and yet he was still creative, engaged and motivated by his work and his students. He was leading major research initiatives in energy modeling and stochastic programming, he continued to work with the Systems Optimization Laboratory team that he had brought together and nurtured, and he actively worked with more Ph.D. students than anyone around. And in the midst of all that, he agreed to teach a master's-level class in the Applications of Operations Research because, as he told me (I was one of his TAs), "the department needs me to do it, and I think I can learn something from this."

And he continued to be unfailingly generous with his time. Just before graduating, I stopped by his office and asked him to sign my copy of his Linear Programming book ("To Vijay, with best wishes for a successful professional career, George").

Of course, he has influenced my career since then, both indirectly and directly. Indirectly through the myriad LP applications that spawned the O.R. consulting industry, my professional home for more than a decade. Directly by serving as a reference when I applied for my current position at SFSU; he was 88 years old at the time, he took my call graciously, and he never hesitated ("whatever I can do to help").

On the fourth floor of the Terman Engineering Center at Stanford (the home of the old Operations Research department) there is a lobby where the stairwell door and the elevators open up. The O.R. faculty offices were down one hallway from this lobby, while another corridor led to grad student offices. Congregating as a department, usually for refreshments before our weekly research seminars, we would often take this opportunity to discuss our research problems. George would occasionally grumble about the need for a blackboard in this lobby, so that we could get "hands-on" with our work right then and there when the inspiration came to us.

Let's put one up — a big one! — with his name underneath it. He would, I think, really like the idea that he was still contributing to our work.



Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, and an operations management consultant.

Footnote

1. Actually, this is a very debatable assumption, even among some of George's students. As his student, close friend and co-author Mukund Thapa pointed out, "There are also some who believe that if he had not invented the Simplex Algorithm/Method, maybe no one would have." "Yes, it looks so obvious now," adds Ed Klotz from ILOG, "but that's just hindsight."

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