Egon Balas
Egon Balas, late Tepper School of Business Professor of Industrial Administration and Applied Mathematics and Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research, was one of the world’s leading mathematical optimization experts and visionary pioneer in integer and disjunctive programming.
Born in Cluj, Romania, Balas was blocked from studying physics by anti-Semitic laws. After joining the Communist underground to oppose the Nazis during WWII, he was arrested and tortured in 1944 by Fascist authorities. He eventually escaped and returned home, to learn his entire family had been killed.
Balas taught himself economics (receiving a diploma licentiate from Bolyai University in 1949) and served in the Romanian government as economics director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, only to be arrested in 1952 during a Stalinist purge, experiencing torture again and held until his release in 1954.
In 1959 when he was disenchanted with communism, Balas joined the Forestry Institute in Bucharest. Faced with a timber harvesting problem, he immersed himself in the emerging field of linear programming, gaining recognition with the seminal ‘Additive Algorithm,’ and ultimately earning Ph.D.’s in economics (University of Brussels, 1967) and mathematics (University of Paris, 1968).
In 1967, Tepper School of Business founding faculty member William Cooper helped recruit Balas to the faculty.
Among his numerous honors, Balas was awarded the prestigious 1995 John von Neumann Prize from INFORMS (considered the Nobel Prize of operations research), the 2001 EURO Gold Medal, and the Humboldt Research Award for U.S. Senior Scientists.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, as an INFORMS fellow and SIAM fellow, into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and to the IFORS Operational Research Hall of Fame.
He received honorary doctorates in mathematics from the University of Waterloo and Miguel Hernandez University in Elche, Spain. Balas also authored a well-received memoir, “Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey Through Fascism and Communism” and a text, “Disjunctive Programming.”
He additionally noted, “Most people do a job which after a while becomes boring and work becomes a burden. And so retirement is a very wise institution and necessary. But some people who are very lucky — I consider myself among those — have a job which they enjoy doing. I do what I like most. I do research. I teach the subjects that I'm interested in. I enjoy getting other people to know the facts and get interested, and so why would I quit?"