Word: mathematician
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...abstruse branch of mathematics known as linear programming. It is the kind of math that has frustrated theoreticians for years, and even the fastest and most powerful computers have had great difficulty juggling the bits and pieces of data. Now Narendra Karmarkar, a 28-year-old Indian-born mathematician at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., after only a year's work has cracked the puzzle of linear programming by devising a new algorithm, a step-by-step mathematical formula. He has translated the procedure into a program that should allow computers to track a greater combination of tasks...
Before the Karmarkar method, linear equations could be solved only in a cumbersome fashion, ironically known as the simplex method, devised by Mathematician George Dantzig in 1947. Problems are conceived of as giant geodesic domes with thousands of sides. Each corner of a facet on the dome represents a possible solution to the equation. Using the simplex method, the computer scours the surface of the dome millions of times to pinpoint the corner with the most likely solution. But the method is slow, and it works only when there are merely a few thousand variables to sort through. Says Karmarkar...
Karmarkar's technique does not attempt to calculate the location of every solution but takes a circuitous route, eliminating groups of combinations without actually considering them, all the time changing the shape of the dome. The mathematician compares this search to origami, the Japanese art of paper folding: the pieces of paper are creased and shaped until the perfect corner - the long-sought solution - is in the center of the figure...
Eleven Western reporters, including members of a U.S. television crew, squeezed into a cramped Moscow apartment one day last week for a rare and risky event: a press conference by three Jewish refuseniks, would-be emigrants to Israel. Their message, as delivered by Boris Klotz, 34, a wiry mathematician: "There are thousands of Jews in the Moscow area alone who want to go to Israel. The authorities tell some of these people that they have insufficient motive, and others that East-West relations are too poor...
Neal I. Koblitz '69, a mathematician at the University of Washington, donates the royalties he receives from his books to a fund he and his wife set up to aid women scientists in Vietnam. Koblitz's Harvard classmate, Michael K. Fenollosa '69, now an assistant vice-president at Boston's Shawmut Bank, writes in recent Class Record Book: "Needless to say, and I suppose, somewhat regretfully. I have become a political conservative (it seems hard to believe that I once voted for George McGovern for President.)" The two men represent two of the many different solutions to the dilemma that...