Egon Balas (June 7, 1922 in

Cluj ; hu, kincses város) , official_name=Cluj-Napoca , native_name= , image_skyline= , subdivision_type1 = County , subdivision_name1 = Cluj County , subdivision_type2 = Status , subdivision_name2 = County seat , settlement_type = City , le ...

, Romania – March 18, 2019) was an

applied mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

of industrial administration and applied mathematics at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. He was the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's

Tepper School of Business The Tepper School of Business is the business school of Carnegie Mellon University. It is located in the university's campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US. The school offers degrees from the undergraduate through doctoral levels, in addition t ...

and did fundamental work in developing integer and disjunctive programming.

Life and education

Balas was born in

(Romania) in a Hungarian Jewish family. His original name was Blatt, which was first changed to the Hungarian Balázs and then later to the Romanian Balaş. He was married to art historian Edith Balas, a survivor of Auschwitz, with whom he had two daughters. He was imprisoned by the Communist authorities for several years after the war. He left Romania in 1966 and accepted an appointment with

in 1967. Balas obtained a "Diploma Licentiate" in

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analy ...

( Bolyai University, 1949) and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

s in economics ( University of Brussels, 1967) and mathematics (

University of Paris The University of Paris (french: link=no, Université de Paris), Metonymy, metonymically known as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, active from 1150 to 1970, with the exception between 1793 and 1806 under the French Revo ...

, 1968). His mathematics PhD thesis was titled ''Minimax et dualité en programmation discrète'' and was written under the direction of

Robert Fortet Robert Fortet (1 May 1912, Boulazac, France – 3 July 1998, Paris) was a French mathematician working on analysis. His doctoral advisor was Maurice René Fréchet. Fortet was a professor at the University of Caen and at the University of P ...

Selected publications

*E. Balas, A. Saxena: Optimizing Over the Split Closure, ''Mathematical Programming'' 113, 2 (2008), 219–240. *E. Balas, M. Perregaard: A Precise Correspondence Between Lift-and-Project Cuts, Simple Disjunctive Cuts, and Mixed Integer Gomory Cuts for 0-1 Programming, ''Mathematical Programming'' B (94), 2003; 221–245. *E. Balas, S. Ceria, G. Cornuéjols: Mixed 0-1 Programming by Lift-and-Project in a Branch-and-Cut Framework, ''Management Science'' 42, 1996; 1229–1246. *E. Balas: The Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem: II Polyhedral Results, ''Networks'' 25, 1995; 199–216. *E. Balas, S. Ceria, G. Cornuéjols: A Lift-and-Project Cutting Plane Algorithm for Mixed 0-1 Programs, ''Mathematical Programming'' 58, 1993; 295–324. *E. Balas: The Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem I, ''Networks'' 19, 1989; 621–636. *E. Balas, J. Adams, D. Zawack: The Shifting Bottleneck Procedure for Job Shop Scheduling, ''Management Science'' 34, 1988; 391–401. *E. Balas, V. Chvátal, J. Nesetril: On The Maximum-Weight Clique Problem, ''Mathematics of Operations Research'' 12, 1987; 522–536. *E. Balas: Disjunctive Programming, ''Annals of Discrete Mathematics'' 5, 1979; 3–51. *E. Balas: An Additive Algorithm for Linear Programming in Zero-One Variables, ''Operations Research'' 13 (4), 1965; 517–546.

Honors and awards

* National Academy of Engineering, 2006 * IFORS Hall of Fame, 2006 * Honorary Doctorate in Mathematics, University of Waterloo, 2005 * Hungarian Academy of Science, external member, 2004 * INFORMS Fellow, 2002 * Honorary Doctorate in Mathematics, Miguel Hernandez University, Elche, Spain, 2002 *

EURO Gold Medal The EURO Gold medal of the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) is the highest distinction within Operations Research (OR) in Europe. The prize was first awarded to Hans-Jürgen Zimmermann in 1985. The medal is awarded a ...

, 2001 * John von Neumann Theory Prize, INFORMS, 1995 * Senior U.S. Scientist Award of the von Humboldt Foundation, 1980–1981

Notes

References

* E. Balas: ''Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey through Fascism and Communism'' (Syracuse University Press, 2000) (translated in Hungarian, Romanian, French, Italian, and German). * E. Balas: Some Thoughts on the Development of Integer Programming During My Research Career, ''European Journal of Operational Research'', 2002, 141 (1) pp. 1–7.

External links