George Dantzig

from Eugene McDonnell:

Sunday's Palo Alto Daily News had a front page headline reading "Famous
math teacher dies". Underneath began an article on George Dantzig, who
died at the age of 90 last Friday, in his home on the Stanford campus.
It began by telling how student Dantzig came in late one day for his UC
Berkeley statistics class, copying down two math problems on the board,
assuming they were homework assignments. A few days later he apologizes
to his professor for taking so long to turn in the homework, saying the
problems were a little more difficult to solve than usual. The
professor barely gave him a glance, telling him to throw it somewhere
on his desk. Six ws later on a Sunday morning the professor showed
up banging on the student's door, saying that Dantzig had inadvertently
solved a world-famous statistics problem that had gone unsolved for
years. The professor told Dantzig that he had written an introduction
to the solution, which he wanted to send out for publication.

Now I'm getting to the connection to APL. In Mike Montalbano's "A
Personal History of APL" (October, 1982) he writes of his connection
with Dantzig.

I was assigned the task of getting budget computation mechanized under
the direction of George Dantzig, who was in charge of the Air Force
budget project. His job was to devise the calculations we were required
to perform, that is, he told me what was needed. I wired the plugboards
and, later, wrote the programs that gave him what he specified.

The original calculations were called "triangular model" calculations
(I understand they were given the acronym TRIM after I left the
project.) The later calculations were solutions of linear-programming
problems, applying the simplex technique that George Dantzig
originated.

Mike provides the Dantzig-Iverson connection, describing his reaction
to studying Ken's paper "The Description of Finite Sequential
Processes" (London, 1962)

The second page took about as much reading time as the first but, since
it had twice as much matter, I was clearly improving. The glimmerings
were now fitful gleams. One thing had definitely chanced, however. I
had no doubts about the value of what I was reading. I was now
virtually certain that the author had something to say and that I'd
better find out what it was.  The third page had an illustration that,
in a few short lines, described George Dantzig's simplex algorithm
simply and precisely.

That was the overwhelming, crucial experience.

In the previous thirteen years, I had participated in so many murky
discussions of what was here presented with crystal clarity that I knew
that what I was reading was of enormous significance to the future of
computing.

I hope you all see the relevance of all this to J.

Arthur, Curtis: I'd appreciate it if you'd forward this to the K and
APL forums.

Eugene