Martin Beale

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Martin Beale (E. M. L. Beale) FRS (1928-1985) was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming.[1]

[edit] Career

He was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge and then joined the Mathematics Group at the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory, working under Stephen Vajda.[2] In 1955 he extended George Dantzig's Simplex Algorithm to minimise a quadratic function.[3]

In 1961 he became a founder member of a computer services company called C.E.I.R (UK) which became Scicon[4] and in 1967 he became Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London.

He was Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society from 1974 to 1976 and Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1978 to 1980, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a member of the International Statistical Institute. In 1979 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society "for his applications of mathematical and statistical techniques to industrial problems and for his contributions to the theory of mathematical programming" and he was elected to the Council of the Royal Society in 1984. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the Operational Research Society in 1980 and became Vice President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. He was also non-executive Chairman of Beale International Technology.[2]

The Times suggested that he "used his blend of theory and state-of-the-art practice to encourage several generations of young mathematicians and computer scientists" that his "many papers and his seminal book Mathematical Programming in Practice were major influences in their field, with their succinctness and clarity."[2]

The Mathematical Programming Society awards the "Beale–Orchard-Hays" Prize in memory of him and of William Orchard-Hays.[5]

[edit] Publications

Beale produced over 100 scholarly papers[6] and two books:

  • Mathematical Programming in Practice Pitman Publishing, London 1968
  • Introduction to Optimization Wiley 1988 ISBN 0471917605 based on his lecture notes and working papers at Scicon and edited by his former colleague Lynne Mackley.

[edit] Notes & References

  1. ^ Royal Society Obituary. Royal Society. Retrieved on 2007-04-15.
  2. ^ a b c Obituary in The Times Sat Dec 28th 1985, p8
  3. ^ On Minimizing A Convex Function Subject to Linear Inequalities E. M. L. Beale Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), Vol. 17, No. 2 (1955), pp. 173-184. The extension also applied to other convex functions and to linear programming with random variables
  4. ^ See eg the bio-info in Introduction to Optimization. Scicon was subsequently bought by BP, and later sold to System Designers in the 1990s and eventually to EDS
  5. ^ MPS Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize
  6. ^ Google scholar