{"id":1839,"date":"2013-11-24T13:00:23","date_gmt":"2013-11-24T17:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1839"},"modified":"2013-11-24T13:00:23","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T17:00:23","slug":"own-a-ton-of-operations-research-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2013\/11\/24\/own-a-ton-of-operations-research-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Own a Ton of Operations Research History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dantzig\"<\/a>Or perhaps own two tons of Operations Research History (I am not sure how much 70 bankers boxes weigh)! \u00a0And not just any history: \u00a0this is the mathematics library of George B. Dantzig<\/a>, available by “private treaty” (i.e.: there is a price; \u00a0if you pay it, you get the whole library) from PBA Galleries<\/a>. \u00a0I suspect everyone who reads this blog knows who Dantzig was, but just in case: he is the Father of Operations Research. \u00a0His fundamental work on the simplex algorithm for linear programming and other work should have won the Economics Nobel Prize. He had a very long (spanning the 1940s practically to the end of his life in 2005) , and very influential, career. \u00a0You can read more about him in this article by Cottle, Johnson, and Wets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the auction site, there are also some reminiscences from his daughter Jessica Dantzig Klass<\/a>. \u00a0 She talks about some of the books in the library:<\/p>\n

I found two copies of Beitraege zur Theorie der linearen Ungleichungen<\/em>, Theodore S. Motzkin\u2019s dissertation, translated \u201cContributions to the Theory of Linear Inequalities.\u201d This work anticipated the development of linear programming by fourteen years and is probably the reason Motzkin is known as the \u201cgrandfather of linear programming\u201d. A close family friend, Ted, as he was known, was a gentle, mild mannered man, with intense eyes, and a sweet smile, and he \u201clived\u201d mathematics, even keeping small pieces of paper by his bed, so that when he had an idea at night he would be able to write it down. His dissertation is interesting from an historic perspective; bridging the gap between Fourier and my father\u2019s work. Ted, a student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, was awarded his Ph.D. in 1933, but it was not published until 1936 in Jerusalem. One can trace the mathematical lineage of Motzkin\u2019s advisor, Alexander Ostrowski, back to Gauss. And until his untimely death in 1970, Motzkin was my husband\u2019s Ph.D. advisor at UCLA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know how expensive the collection is (and I certainly don’t have room for 70 bankers boxes of material), but it would be great if an organization (INFORMS<\/a>, are you listening) or a historically-minding researcher picked this up. \u00a0I suspect in the future, there will be far fewer libraries from great researchers. \u00a0I know that my own “library” is really nothing more than the hard drive on whatever computer I am using.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or perhaps own two tons of Operations Research History (I am not sure how much 70 bankers boxes weigh)! \u00a0And not just any history: \u00a0this is the mathematics library of George B. Dantzig, available by “private treaty” (i.e.: there is a price; \u00a0if you pay it, you get the whole library) from PBA Galleries. \u00a0I … Continue reading “Own a Ton of Operations Research History”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}