Eugene Lawler

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Eugene Leighton (Gene) Lawler
Born1933 (1933)
DiedSeptember 2, 1994
NationalityAmerican
Scientific career
Fieldscomputer science, biology
Notable studentsDavid Shmoys, Tandy Warnow

Eugene Leighton (Gene) Lawler (1933 – September 2, 1994) was an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.[1][2]

Academic life

Lawler came to

Anthony G. Oettinger with a dissertation entitled Some Aspects of Discrete Mathematical Programming.[1][2][5] He then became a faculty member at the University of Michigan until 1971, when he moved to Berkeley.[2] He retired in 1994, shortly before his death.[6]

At Berkeley, Lawler's doctoral students included Marshall Bern, Chip Martel, Arvind Raghunathan, Arnie Rosenthal, Huzur Saran, David Shmoys, and Tandy Warnow.[5][7]

Research

Lawler was an expert on combinatorial optimization and a founder of the field,[8] the author of the widely used textbook Combinatorial Optimization: Networks and Matroids and coauthor of The Traveling Salesman Problem: a guided tour of combinatorial optimization. He played a central role in rescuing the ellipsoid method for linear programming from obscurity in the West.[1][9] He also wrote (with D. E. Wood) a heavily cited 1966 survey on branch and bound algorithms,[10] selected as a citation classic in 1987,[2] and another influential early paper on

polynomial time.[1][12]

The

satisfiability problems. Lenstra[1]
writes that "Gene would invariably comment that this is why a world with two sexes has been devised."

During the 1970s, Lawler made great headway in systematizing algorithms for

notation for theoretic scheduling problems, which (despite the existence of earlier notations) became standard in the study of scheduling algorithms.[13][14] Another later survey is also highly cited (over 1000 citations each in Google scholar).[15]

In the late 1980s, Lawler shifted his research focus to problems of

evolutionary trees and several works on sequence alignment.[2]

Social activism

In Spring 1969, while on sabbatical in Berkeley, Lawler took part in a

Richard Karp bailed him out.[6]
Karp recalls Lawler as "the social conscience of the CS Division, always looking out for the welfare of students and especially concerned for women, minorities and handicapped students".[6]

Awards and honors

A special issue of the journal Mathematical Programming (vol. 82, issues 1–2) was dedicated in Lawler's honor in 1998.[8]

The ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery every two years for "humanitarian contributions within computer science and informatics".[16]

Books

References

  1. ^
    S2CID 62210683
    .
  2. ^
    S2CID 5267081
    .
  3. ^ a b Lawler, E. L. (1991), "Old stories", in Lenstra, J. K.; Rinnooy Kan, A. H. G.; Schrijver, A. (eds.), History of Mathematical Programming: A Collection of Personal Reminiscences, North-Holland, pp. 97–106.
  4. ^ Editorial staff (1995) In Memoriam: Eugene L. Lawler, SIAM Journal on Computing 24(1), 1-2.
  5. ^ a b Eugene Leighton Lawler at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  6. ^
    Karp, Richard (2003), A Personal View of Computer Science at Berkeley
    , EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley.
  7. ^ Theoretical computer science academic genealogy, Ian Parberry, 1996, retrieved 2010-09-17.
  8. ^
    doi:10.1007/BF01585862
    .
  9. ^ Browne, Malcolm W. (November 7, 1979), "A Soviet discovery rocks world of mathematics: Russian's surprise problem-solving discovery reported", The New York Times.
  10. JSTOR 168733
    .
  11. JSTOR 2628367
    .
  12. S2CID 206801650
    .
  13. ^ Graham, Ronald L.; Lawler, Eugene L.; Lenstra, Jan K.; Rinnooy Kan, A. H. G. (1979), "Optimization and approximation in deterministic sequencing and scheduling: a survey", Discrete optimization I: proceedings of the Advanced research institute on discrete optimization and systems applications, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, vol. 4, North-Holland, p. 287.
  14. ISBN 978-3-540-43617-1
    .
  15. ^ Lawler, Eugene L.; Lenstra, Jan K.; Rinnooy Kan, A. H. G.; Shmoys, David B. (1993), "Sequencing and scheduling: algorithms and complexity", in Graves, S. C.; Rinnooy Kan, A. H. G.; Zipkin, Paul Herbert (eds.), Logistics of Production and Inventory, Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, vol. 4, North Holland, pp. 445–522.
  16. ^ Eugene L. Lawler Award, ACM, retrieved 2010-09-14.
  17. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1978-14493-0
    .

External links
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