George Dantzig died this week at 90. He was the inventor of the simplex algorithm, which made it possible to solve linear programming problems. The Operations Research society, INFORMS, has an obituary. To a large extent, he made my field of OR possible, since it was the first time real interesting problems could be solved with a computer. This may seem odd to non-techies, but I use the simplex algorithm every day to solve problems. He was a giant in our field.
I hope that when I die, I rate a Slashdot posting.
He even has his own urban legend.
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