Person: Rothblum, Uriel George
Uri Rothblum was an Israeli mathematician who made important contributions to operations research.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- The Nazi party had come to power in Germany in 1933 and their anti-Semitic policies together with a clear desire to take control of Austria made Rothblum's parents realise that they were not safe in Vienna.
- This took place in 1948, when Rothblum was only one year old, and at that time many Zionist institutions became Israeli government institutions.
- At school, Rothblum showed great abilities and he was particularly passionate about chemistry.
- Aumann, not surprisingly, gave Rothblum a Master's thesis topic from game theory and he wrote the thesis Values of Games with a Continuum of Players.
- It was working with Aumann that led to Rothblum's first mathematical paper, namely On orderable set functions and continuity published in the Israel Journal of Mathematics in 1973.
- After the award of his Master's degree, Rothblum moved to the United States to undertake research for his doctorate funded by a Fulbright Fellowship.
- Rothblum was awarded a Ph.D. for his thesis Multiplicative Markov Decision Chains in 1974.
- Three papers by Rothblum appeared in 1975, namely: Multivariate constant risk posture; Normalized Markov decision chains.
- The terms 'Rothblum bases' and the 'Rothblum index theorem' which are used today refer to results from this paper (and also, of course, from his thesis).
- In the summer of 1974, Rothblum worked as a consultant at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, before taking up the position of Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York.
- Moshe Haviv did a Ph.D. at Yale supervised by Rothblum.
- In 1984 Rothblum returned to Israel to take up the position of Professor in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
- In addition to these positions at Technion, Rothblum was pleased to be able to make frequent visits to the United States.
- Rothblum served on the editorial board of several journals: Letters in Linear Algebra and Its Application (1980-81); SIAM Journal on Algebraic and Discrete Methods (1983-87); SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (1988-93); Operations Research (1996-99); Journal on Combinatorial Optimization (2005-2012); World Scientific Series on applied mathematics (2006-2012); Linear Algebra and Its Applications (1982-2012); and Mathematics of Operations Research (1979-2012).
- For his outstanding contributions to operations research, Rothblum received awards such as: the New England Academic Excellence Award, 1989; the Operations Research Meritorious Service Award, 1997; the Operations Research Meritorious Service Award, 1999; the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Fellow Award, 2003; and the Israeli Operational Research Society Prize for Excellence in Research in Operations Research, 2005.
- In collaboration with Frank K Hwang, Rothblum published the 2-volume text Partitions: Optimality and Clustering (2012).
Born 16 March 1947, Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine (now Israel). Died 26 March 2012, Haifa, Israel.
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
