Marguerite Straus Frank, is an American-French mathematician, and pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.
Education
After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto, she contributed largely to the field of Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her Doctor of Philosophy thesis, and to transportation theory. She was one of the first female Doctor of Philosophy students in mathematics at Harvard University.
Career
Together with Philip Wolfe in 1956 at Princeton, she invented the Frank–Wolfe algorithm, an iterative optimization method for general constrained non-linear problems. While linear programming was popular at that time, the paper marked an important change of paradigm to more general non-linear convex optimization. During that time, both Marguerite Frank and Philip Wolfe were part of the Princeton logistics project led by Harold West. Kuhn and Albert West. Tucker.
In 1977, she became an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, before moving to Rider University.
Marguerite Frank was a visiting professor to Stanford (1985–1990), and École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales Business School in Paris (1991).
Membership
She was elected a member of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1981.