18 May 2005 George Dantzig (1914-2005) and Saunders Mac Lane (1909-2005)
Two very famous mathematicians have recently left this world. George Dantzig passed away last Friday, and Saunders Mac Lane died on April 14.
Dantzig is famous for having invented linear programming and for the simplex method for solving linear programming problems. On his first day as a doctoral student at Berkeley, Dantzig was late for class, and entering the lecture theatre saw a problem that his professor had scribbled on the blackboard. It was a classic unsolved statistics puzzle. Thinking that it was an assignment for the class, Dantzig solved the problem, and began his career as a research mathematician. Apparently, this episode inspired the feats of the young janitor in the movie Good Will Hunting.
Saunders Mac Lane helped develop category theory and co-authored A Survey of Modern Algebra with Garrett Birkhoff. Read "Garrett Birkhoff and The Survey of Modern Algebra," by Mac Lane in Notices of the AMS, December 1997.
Addendum, 19 May 2005: It turns out that the open problems solved by Dantzig believing they were homework assignments were actually two! See this story.
Last modified: Thursday, 19-May-2005 10:45:02 CEST.