Video Excerpt

IRV
How did you choose optimization as a career?

ALAN
Well, actually, it chose me. I graduated from Columbia in 1950 and spent the next year at the Institute for Advanced Study. I fully anticipated that I'd get an academic job but jobs were scarce that year. I got the notion that I could work for the government because Marshall Hall, who was a professor at Cal Tech, had come around recruiting for the National Security Agency, and boy, the idea of working for Washington really thrilled me. But my wife said, "Listen, maybe there are better places to work that don't have to recruit." So, I found out about the National Bureau of Standards, now known as the National Institute of Science and Technology. They were hiring and I applied for a job - even though I knew no applied mathematics whatsoever. They hired me - not because of my resume but because they had a contract with the air force to do work with linear programming and they didn't have enough people on staff. So, I went to Washington in 1951. I'd never even heard of linear programming before.

IRV
Who were you working with at that time and how did their ideas strike you?

ALAN
George Dantzig was with the Air Controller Office. I met him, Emil Schell, Alex Orden, and the rest of his crew. They came over to my office and explained linear programming to me and how useful it was going to be. I was dazzled not only by the novelty or the brilliance of it, but by their incredible ambitions and their certainty that they were developing a mathematical tool that would really be useful in planning. I thought these people must be out of their minds!

IRV
What was it about their ambitions that you found so exciting?

ALAN
Well, they described its use in air force planning, and I believe there was already some use for it in oil refineries at that time.

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