Background
Johnson was born on May 21, 1916, in Buhl, Minnesota.
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Martin Johnson
Edit ProfileEducation
While serving, he also earned an Master of Surgery in meteorology from New York University in 1942.
Career
He earned a Bachelor of Arts and then an Master of Arts in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and 1940 respectively. World World War II interrupted Johnson"s mathematical studies: he enlisted in the United States Air Force, earning the rank of major. After the war, Johnson returned to graduate study in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, finishing his doctorate in 1950.
His dissertation, on the subject of number theory, was supervised by David Bourgin, a student of George David Birkhoff.
In the same year, he joined the Research and Development Corporation, becoming part of what has been called "the most remarkable group of mathematicians working on optimization ever assembled". With George Dantzig and Doctorate. R. Fulkerson, Johnson pioneered the use of cutting-plane methods for integer linear programming in solving the travelling salesman problem.
He also made important contributions to the theory of scheduling production processes, writing an early paper on the flow shop scheduling problem that set the stage for much future research. Johnson graphs and the closely related Johnson scheme are named after Johnson, as is the Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm for generating all permutations of n items by swapping adjacent elements.
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Born
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Died
June 26, 1996 (aged 80) -
Nationality
United States