William R. Pulleyblank is a Canadian and American

operations research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...

er. He is a professor of operations research at the

United States Military Academy The United States Military Academy (USMA), also known metonymically as West Point or simply as Army, is a United States service academy in West Point, New York. It was originally established as a fort, since it sits on strategic high groun ...

(West Point), where he also holds the Class of 1950 Chair of Advanced Technology.William Pulleyblank, Ph.D.
USMA Network Science Center, retrieved 2014-12-08.

Education and career

Pulleyblank obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in 1973; his thesis, supervised by

Jack Edmonds Jack R. Edmonds (born April 5, 1934) is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, pol ...

, concerned

perfect matching In graph theory, a perfect matching in a graph is a matching that covers every vertex of the graph. More formally, given a graph , a perfect matching in is a subset of edge set , such that every vertex in the vertex set is adjacent to exactly ...

theory from the point of view of

polyhedral combinatorics Polyhedral combinatorics is a branch of mathematics, within combinatorics and discrete geometry, that studies the problems of counting and describing the faces of convex polyhedra and higher-dimensional convex polytopes. Research in polyhedral comb ...

. He worked at IBM beginning in the late 1960s and then returned to academia in 1974,. as a professor at the

University of Calgary The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...

, before moving back to Waterloo in 1982.William Pulleyblank
Waterloo Combinatorics & Optimization, retrieved 2014-12-10. At Waterloo, he held the CP/NSERC Chair of Optimization and Computer Applications. In 1990 he began a second stint at IBM, where his work included leading the Blue Gene project. He was promoted to vice president in 2004, and retired from IBM in 2010, at which time he joined the West Point faculty.

Awards and honors

In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Berlin.

The College of Saint Rose The College of Saint Rose is a private Roman Catholic college in Albany, New York. It was founded in 1920 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet as a women's college. It became fully co-educational in 1969; the following year, the college a ...

, in

Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York City ...

, and McMaster University, in

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

, Canada, have both given Pulleyblank honorary degrees. He is also a recipient of the Alberta Centennial Medal, a

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

INFORMS The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics. It was established in 1995 with the merger of ...

, and (since 2010) a member of the National Academy of Engineering.Dr. William Robert Pulleyblank
National Academy of Engineering member directory, retrieved 2014-12-09.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pulleyblank, William R. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American operations researchers University of Waterloo alumni Academic staff of the University of Calgary Academic staff of the University of Waterloo United States Military Academy faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences