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Grande conférence DIRO-CRM-rcm2
Friday, January 26, 2007
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About the speaker
Ralph E. Gomory is President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1989. He is considered by many as “the father of integer programming” as he is the inventor of the famous cutting-plane method that bares his name. Other influential work by Dr. Gomory concerns multicommodity network flows (the famous Gomory-Hu tree, introduced in 1961), column generation for industrial cutting stock problems (for this contribution, he received, with his co-author Gilmore, the ORSA Lanchester Prize in 1963), and group relaxations for integer programming (which led to the corner polyhedra, still one of his favorite research topics). In recent years, he has written on the nature of technology and product development, industrial competitiveness, technological change, and on economic models involving economies of scale. He is the author of a recent MIT Press book (with Professor William J. Baumol) on conflicts in international trade. Dr. Gomory received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1954 to 1957, was Higgins Lecturer and Assistant Professor at Princeton from 1957 to 1959, and joined the research division of IBM in 1959. He was named IBM Fellow in 1964, became Director of the Mathematical Sciences Department in 1965, and Director of Research in 1970. He held that position until 1986, becoming IBM Vice President in 1973 and Senior Vice President in 1985. From 1986 to 1989, year of his retirement from IBM, he was IBM Vice President for Science and Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Philosophical Society. He has been awarded seven honorary degrees and many prizes, including the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1984, the IEEE Engineering Leadership Recognition Award in 1988, the National Medal of Science awarded by the President of the United States in 1988, the Arthur M. Bueche Award of the National Academy of Engineering in 1993, the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment in 1998, the Madison Medal Award of Princeton University in 1999, and the Sheffield Fellowship Award of the Yale University Faculty of Engineering in 2000.