The Hindu Business Line : A tribute to George Dantzig

A YOUNG student walks into the classroom. He is late and finds the professor well into his lecture. He notices two problems written on the blackboard. He thinks they are routine assignments and copies them down in his notebook.

He tries to work on them at home. Finding them slightly harder than the run-of-the-mill homework problems, he takes longer than usual to solve them. He apologises for the delay and submits the assignments to the professor after a few days.

Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, the student is shaken from sleep by his professor banging on the door. Excited, the professor tells him that he has written out an introduction to the student's research paper and wants to get it published immediately. The student does not have the foggiest idea what the professor is talking about.

And so the professor breaks it to him: The two problems he presumed were homework assignments were statistical problems that had defied solution. And now that they had been solved, the professor was eager to get the student's results published right away.

That young student was George Bernard Dantzig, and the professor Jerzy Neyman. This inspiring Ramanujamesque incident happened in the hallowed precincts of the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1930s and was an early indication of Dantzig's brilliance. The story is now part of American folklore, variants of which have wended their way into motivational courses and Hollywood movies.

Dantzig was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1914. His father, Tobias, was a mathematician and his mother, Anja, too had studied numbers in Paris.

Dantzig obtained his bachelors degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Maryland in 1936 and a masters in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1937. After a brief stint in Washington, he enrolled for further studies in Berkeley, where the famous incident happened. Dantzig's hallmark was that when given a practical problem without mention of its mathematical difficulty, he simply would go ahead and solve it.

That is how he developed the Simplex method that lead to the birth of a new field in applied mathematics called Linear Programming, and made him world famous.

No mathematical discovery has arguably had such an economic impact on business and industry in the last 50 years as has linear programming.

Dantzig was serving as a civilian in the US Air Force, during the Second World War, when he came up with linear programming. As head of combat analysis, Dantzig was in charge of developing detailed logistical plans called `programmes' for the US Air Force. Dantzig had to devise his own thumb rules and techniques to generate the logistical plans. By the end of the war, Dantzing had become an expert at managing the movements of what in his own words were "hundreds of thousands of different kinds of material goods and perhaps fifty thousand specialties of people".

Dantzig returned to Berkeley after the War and got his doctorate in 1946. He then began formalising his findings at the air force and the Simplex method for solving linear programmes was born in 1947.

The advent of computers in the 1950s saw Dantzig fashion his mathematical innovation into a computer algorithm to enable automated solutions to real-life planning problems. This gave impetus to the evolution of what is now better known by terms such as Operations Research and Management Science. The single biggest beneficiary of Dantzig's mathematical invention in India is perhaps the Railways, where linear programming techniques are used for developing and optimising operating plans for train routes, schedules and driver duties.

Linear programming has enabled the Indian Railways tackle its planning problems with considerable success.

Linear programming revolutionised the field of Operations Research and so also academia and industry.

The elegance of Dantzig's Simplex method has remained unmatched by subsequent breakthroughs in the field. Its ease of implementation in computers and effectiveness in solving real-life problems, continues to make Simplex the algorithm of choice for practitioners across the globe and continues to be at the core of Operations Research and Management Science.

Dantzig served as a professor at Berkeley from 1960 to 1966 and then at Stanford University, where he remained for the rest of his life as Professor Emeritus. He won numerous awards and accolades, including the US National Medal of Science in 1976.

Dantzig passed away on May 13. He was 91. He leaves behind a legion of students who trained under him and an army of practitioners who apply and advance his techniques to solve problems and promote efficiency in various fields every day.

Dantzig's Simplex method has found its way into almost every computer through spreadsheet programmes, such as Microsoft Excel.

Dantzig was named by his parents after George Bernard Shaw, in the hope that he would be inspired by the playwright to take up creative writing. That was not to be. But Dantzing did manage to complete his first and only literary opus in his last days, a science fiction novel that is awaiting publication.

(The author, an alumnus of IIT Madras and Massachussetts Institute of Technology, is a risk-management specialist.)

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Pitfalls of brand marketing

Modernising the legal system

India's drawbacks

NDC meeting ahead — Time for treating economic ills

Africa's debt deal: Not out of the blue

Drug trial is a three-legged stool

N-weapons in emerging world order — Symbols of power and privilege

A tribute to George Dantzig — To him, impossible was nothing

Paris air show

Right to information

Spare independent directors