Inside Story
Remembering the Great GBD
Peter Horner, editor
horner@lionhrtpub.com
George Bernard Dantzig, widely known as the "Father of Linear Programming," passed away on May 13 at the age of 90, leaving behind a legacy of mathematical achievement and humanity that few, if any, can match. The word "legend" is often hastily attached to individuals before it's earned these days, but such is not the case with the truly legendary "GBD."
Dr. Dantzig is to O.R. what Base Ruth is to baseball: a larger-than-life figure who, through enormous individual talent, redefined the way the game is played — not for his generation, but for all time. The Babe did it with a big stick and an even bigger persona. Dr. Dantzig spoke softly, but, like the Babe, he carried a big stick: linear programming.
Dr. Dantzig developed LP in 1947 as a means to optimally manage resources for the fledgling U.S. Air Force. The methodology eventually became the cornerstone in the effort to apply mathematical analysis to decision-making in industry as well as government, a discipline we all recognize as operations research.
I called Dr. Dantzig for an interview back in 1999, a few months before his 85th birthday. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I feared the worst. Would the "Father of Linear Programming" find my questions trivial and tedious? After all, the interview I had in mind — a casual conversation, really — wouldn't even attempt to delve into the nuances of the simplex method. I was simply looking to solicit Dr. Dantzig's answers to a wide range of questions, including a few from out of left field (How would the country be different with an operations researcher living in the White House instead of a politician?) that would give him an opportunity to share his wit, as well as his well-documented wisdom, with readers of OR/MS Today.
As it turned out, my fears were unfounded. Dr. Dantzig quickly put me at ease, and we proceeded to have an enjoyable 45-minute chat punctuated with more than a few quips and laughs. Dr. Dantzig not only possessed one of the great mathematical minds of the 20th century, he was also a superb storyteller.
As a tribute to Dr. Dantzig, we've republished that interview in this issue ("Pillar of the Profession," page 24).
Saul Gass, one of Dr. Dantzig's first Ph.D. students at U.C. Berkeley in the early 1960s, and Vijay Mehrotra, who took Dantzig's LP class as a grad student at Stanford 25 years later, also contributed to the tribute. On short notice, Gass authored a brief obituary that outlines some of the highlights of Dr. Dantzig's career ("Achievements & Accolades," page 26). Gass, along with a handful of other former students and colleagues of Dr. Dantzig, is now in the process of writing his personal remembrances of Dr. Dantzig for our August issue.
Along those same lines, Mehrotra, author of the ongoing "Was It Something I Said?" department for OR/MS Today, recalls Dr. Dantzig as a source of "amazement" and "inspiration" during his days at Stanford ("My Time with the Great GBD," page 30).
Coincidentally, our biennial survey of linear programming software also appears in this issue (page 46). I'm not sure if the "Father of Linear Programming" would have found that ironic or amusing. Probably a little of both.
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