Laurence A. Wolsey

The Lanchester Prize Committee chose three "deserving" individuals and two "excellent" publications for the 1989 prize.

The 1989 Lanchester Prize was shared by Jean Walrand, author of An Introduction to Queueing Networks (Prentice Hall, 1988), and George L. Nemhauser and Laurence A. Wolsey, whose combined efforts produced Integer and Combinatorial Optimization (John Wiley, 1988). Nemhauser becomes the first two-time winner of the prestigious award. He won it in 1977 for the paper, "Location of Bank Accounts to Optimize Float: An Analytic Study of an Exact and Approximate Algorithm," coauthored by G. Cornuejols and M.L. Fisher.

"George and I are both delighted and surprised by this award, " said Wolsey, speaking on behalf of himself and Nemhauser. "It cannot be often that an introduction to an introduction gets a prize. Two years ago the Lanchester Prize was, you remember, given to Lex Schrijver for his remarkable book, Linear and Integer Programming, which was just the introductory chapters of a book on combinatorial optimization he had been writing for years. One could regard our book as an introduction to his book."

Wolsey thanked a long list of individuals and institutions "who inspired and helped us along the way," incl`uding Martin Beale, Jack Edmonds, Ray Fulkerson, Ralph Gomory, Jack Mitten, Jerry Shapiro, John Little, Cornell, M.l.T., Georgia Tech and the University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium.

In their book Integer and Combinatorial Optimization, Nemhauser and Wolsey set out to write a graduate text and reference hook for researchers and practitioners that unifies theory and algorithms. The committee found the authors far exceeding their goal, adding that "many believe they have defined the way people will think about and discuss the field of integer programming and combinatorial optimization for years to come."

"George Nemhauser and Laurence Wolsey capture the progress that has been made in discrete optimization over the past two decades. They include many results that heretofore have only appeared in research journals and monographs, and have done so in a lucid and accessible style. Their coverage is broad, capturing essentially all of this rapidly changing field but also condenses, simplifies and synthesizes this remarkable amount of information. "

The citation sums up the importance of Nemhauser and Wolsey's work with the following words: "Whether readers are planning to conduct research, use practical algorithms, or are fascinated by theory in discrete optimization, this book is a must for their libraries."

Nemhauser, of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and Wolsey, of the Center for Operations Research and Economics at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, received honorable mention in the Lanchester Prize competition last year.