L. R. Ford, Jr.

Not to be confused with Lester R. Ford, Sr..

Lester Randolph Ford, Jr. (born September 23, 1927, Houston) is an American mathematician specializing in network flow problems. He is the son of mathematician Lester R. Ford, Sr..[1]

Ford's paper with D. R. Fulkerson on the maximum flow problem and the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm for solving it, published as a technical report in 1954 and in a journal in 1956, established the max-flow min-cut theorem.[2][3] With Richard Bellman, Ford also developed the Bellman–Ford algorithm for finding shortest paths in graphs that have negatively-weighted edges.

References

  1. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Lester Randolph Ford", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Ford.html .
  2. ^ Ford, L. R., Jr.; Fulkerson, D. R. (1956), "Maximal flow through a network", Canadian Journal of Mathematics 8: 399–404, MR0079251, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/lans/readings/routing/ford-max_flow-1956.pdf .
  3. ^ Gass, Saul I.; Assad, Arjang (2005), "1954 Max-flow min-cut theorem", An annotated timeline of operations research: an informal history, International series in operations research & management science, 75, Springer-Verlag, p. 96, ISBN 9781402081125 .