Ellis L. Johnson

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Ellis Johnson
Born (1938-07-26) July 26, 1938 (age 85)
Citizenship American
Alma mater Georgia Institute of Technology
University of California at Berkeley
Known for Integer programming
Combinatorial optimization
Cyclic group
Crew scheduling
Scientific career
Fields Mathematician
Institutions Johns Hopkins University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Ellis Lane Johnson is the Professor Emeritus and the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

Contents

In 1988, Johnson was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for fundamental contributions to discrete optimization and software design, and its practical applications to distribution and manufacturing systems.

Early life and education

Johnson received a B.A. in mathematics at Georgia Tech and earned his Ph.D. in operations research from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965. [1] He was student of George Dantzig

Career

In the 1950s, Dr. Ellis Johnson served as director of the Operations Research Office of the Johns Hopkins University. [2] Later, after three years at Yale University, Johnson joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, where he founded and managed the Optimization Center from 1982 until 1990, when he was named IBM Fellow. [1] In 1980-1981, Johnson visited the University of Bonn, Germany, as recipient of the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award.

From 1990 to 1993, Johnson began teaching and conducting research at Georgia Tech, where he co-founded and co-directed the Logistics Engineering Center with Professor George Nemhauser. [3] He joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 1994.

Johnson's research interests in logistics include crew scheduling and real-time repair, fleet assignment and routing, distribution planning, network problems, and combinatorial optimization.

Awards and honors

Johnson has received a number of awards, including the following: [3]

John von Neumann Theory Prize

Johnson received the John von Neumann Theory Prize jointly with Manfred W. Padberg in recognition of his fundamental contributions to integer programming and combinatorial optimization. Their work combines theory with algorithm development, computational testing, and solution of hard real-world problems in the best tradition of Operations Research and the Management Sciences. In their joint work with Crowder and in subsequent work with others, they showed how to formulate and solve efficiently very large-scale practical 0-1 programs with important applications in industry and transportation. [4]

The selection committee cited among Johnson's contribution three important and influential papers he produced in the early seventies—two of them with Ralph Gomory—which developed and extended in significant ways the group theoretic approach to integer programming pioneered by Gomory. In particular, Johnson showed how the approach can be extended to the case of mixed integer programs. As an outgrowth of this work, Johnson contributed decisively to the development of what became known as the subadditive approach to integer programming. Still in the seventies, in a seminal paper co-authored with Jack Edmonds, Johnson showed how several basic optimization problems defined on graphs can be solved in polynomial time by reducing them to weighted matching problems. One example is finding minimum T-joins (i.e., edge sets whose only endpoints of odd degree are those in a specified vertex set T). An important special case is the seemingly difficult problem of finding a shortest tour in a graph that traverses every edge at least once, known as the Postman problem. The stark contrast between the polynomial solvability of this problem and the intractability of the traveling salesman problem in which the tour is supposed to traverse vertices rather than edges, helped focus attention on the phenomenon so typical of combinatorial structures: two seemingly very similar problems turn out in reality to be vastly different.

Related Research Articles

The John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is awarded annually to an individual who has made fundamental and sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linear programming</span> Method to solve optimization problems

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cutting-plane method</span> Optimization technique for solving (mixed) integer linear programs

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Edmonds</span> American/Canadian mathematician and computer scientist

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Ralph Edward Gomory is an American applied mathematician and executive. Gomory worked at IBM as a researcher and later as an executive. During that time, his research led to the creation of new areas of applied mathematics.

The Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), known as the Mathematical Programming Society until 2010, is an international association of researchers active in optimization. The MOS encourages the research, development, and use of optimization—including mathematical theory, software implementation, and practical applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linear programming relaxation</span>

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Alan Jerome Hoffman was an American mathematician and IBM Fellow emeritus, T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM, in Yorktown Heights, New York. He was the founding editor of the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications, and held several patents. He contributed to combinatorial optimization and the eigenvalue theory of graphs. Hoffman and Robert Singleton constructed the Hoffman–Singleton graph, which is the unique Moore graph of degree 7 and diameter 2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred W. Glover</span> American computer scientist

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Arkadi Nemirovski is a professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been a leader in continuous optimization and is best known for his work on the ellipsoid method, modern interior-point methods and robust optimization.

Jon Lee is an American mathematician and operations researcher, the G. Lawton and Louise G. Johnson Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is known for his research in nonlinear discrete optimization and combinatorial optimization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Nemhauser</span> American operations researcher (born 1937)

George Lann Nemhauser is an American operations researcher, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former president of the Operations Research Society of America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Schrijver</span> Dutch mathematician and computer scientist

Alexander (Lex) Schrijver is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of discrete mathematics and optimization at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Since 1993 he has been co-editor in chief of the journal Combinatorica.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William J. Cook</span> American mathematician

William John Cook is an American operations researcher and mathematician, and Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurence Wolsey</span>

Laurence Alexander Wolsey is a Belgian-English mathematician working in the field of integer programming. He is a former president and research director of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the engineering school of the same university.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gérard Cornuéjols</span> American mathematician

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Grötschel</span> German mathematician

Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).

The Dantzig Prize is given every three years to one or more individuals for research which, by virtue of its originality, breadth, and depth, has a major impact on the field of mathematical programming. It is named in honor of George B. Dantzig and is awarded jointly by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS). The prize fund was established in 1979, and the prize first awarded in 1982.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shmuel Onn</span> Israeli mathematician

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References

  1. 1 2 "Ellis Johnson: Deep Roots at Georgia Tech". H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. 2010-09-07. Archived from the original on 2010-09-29. Retrieved 2011-07-09.
  2. Flagle, Charles D. (2002). "Some Origins of Operations Research in the Health Services". Operations Research. 50: 52–60. doi:10.1287/opre.50.1.52.17805.
  3. 1 2 "H.Milton Stewart School of ISyE Faculty". Archived from the original on 2009-10-14. Retrieved 2009-11-20.
  4. "ISyE Faculty Named Inaugural SIAM Fellows". Archived from the original on 2012-02-20.