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Memorial Tributes Volume 24 (2022) / Chapter Skim
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EGON BALAS
Pages 28-35

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From page 29...
... They were married for 70 years. After the war and still in the Communist Party, Balas taught himself economics and changed his birth name from Blatt, a common Jewish surname, to Balas in order to serve in the Romanian government as economics director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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From page 30...
... Together they developed tools for transportation planning based on network flow theory and linear programming. They published a dozen papers together (Hammer was using the name Ivanescu at the time)
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From page 31...
... Egon was forever grateful to Carnegie Mellon for the stability that this position provided to his family. His most significant contribution is undoubtedly his extensive work on disjunctive programming, starting with intersection cuts.2 These ideas were novel and the operations research community was slow to accept them.
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From page 32...
... Using tools of convex analysis, he showed how to derive rich families of cutting planes from any feasible basis of a linear relaxation and any convex set S whose interior contains the basic solution but no feasible integer point. These cuts are Balas' intersection cuts.
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From page 33...
... Management Sciences Research Report No. 348, Carnegie Mellon University, July 1974.
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From page 34...
... Egon also made noteworthy research contributions to the knapsack and set-covering problems and in the area of scheduling: machine scheduling via disjunctive graphs, the shifting bottleneck procedure for job shop scheduling (with Joe Adams and Dan Zawack) , choosing the overall size of the US strategic petroleum reserve, the prize-collecting traveling salesman problem, and an application for scheduling rolling mills in the steel industry (with Red Martin)
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From page 35...
... Egon died March 18, 2019. He is survived by Edith, professor emerita of art history in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University; daughters Anna Balas and Vera Balas Koutsoyannis; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
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Key Terms

  • convex hull
  • cutting planes
  • integer programming
  • additive algorithm
  • mixed integer

  • linear program
  • linear programs
  • disjunctive programming
  • disjunctive cuts
  • research contributions

  • convex set
  • balas wrote
  • road segment
  • implicit enumeration
  • section cuts

  • solution set
  • operations researcher
  • research report
  • simple disjunctive
  • prominent operations

  • research letters
  • integer gomory
  • integer programs
  • convex analysis
  • linear inequalities

  • linear relaxation
  • noteworthy research
  • feasible integer
  • integer cut
  • integer linear


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