IN MEMORIAM: LEONID KHACHIYAN

Leonid G. Khachiyan of South Brunswick, N.J., professor of computer science at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, died suddenly of a heart attack on April 29. He was 52. 

“He was among the world’s most famous computer scientists,” said Haym Hirsh, chair of the computer science department at Rutgers.

Khachiyan’s fame began in 1979 when Craig Whitney in The New York Times called him, “the mystery author of a new mathematical theorem that has rocked the world of computer analysis.” As an obscure mathematician living in Moscow, his discovery first appeared in the Soviet journal Doklady, little known outside the field, and it went unnoticed for months. Western mathematicians first presented his work to a broader audience at the International Mathematical Programming Symposium in 1979 in Montreal.

Khachiyan proved the existence of an efficient way to solve linear programming problems. His 1979 breakthrough dealt with the underlying mathematics, opening doors beyond linear programming to what is known as combinatorial optimization – finding the best of a finite, but often an astronomically large number of options.

Khachiyan’s achievement untangled serious roadblocks to designing more advanced methods to attack harder computer problems. Applications today extend to telecommunications, economics, engineering, biology, agriculture, and the social sciences.

Of Armenian descent, Khachiyan was born on May 3, 1952, in St. Petersburg and moved to Moscow with his parents at age 9 where he later earned a Ph.D. in computational mathematics in 1978 and a D.Sc. in computer science in 1984, both from the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1982 he won the prestigious Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics.

Prior to coming to the United States in 1989, Khachiyan held a series of research and teaching positions at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1989 he joined Cornell University’s School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering as a visiting professor. He joined Rutgers in 1990. Source: Rutgers