Abraham Charnes was a fundamental contributor to many areas of mathematical programming, including linear programming, fractional programming, semiinfinite programming, and data envelopment analysis.
Education
Charnes graduated in mathematics from the University of Illinois in 1938, followed by a Master’s in 1939. He then took a graduate scholarship at Harvard. Charnes’ Harvard studies were interrupted by World War II. In the Naval Reserve, he worked in torpedo performance and control, supersonic flight, fire control, and weapon damage assessment. At this time, he also did the first US pro-submarine operations research. Following his Naval service, he completed his doctoral dissertation at Illinois in 1947.
Career
He began his academic career as assistant professor of mathematics at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie–Mellon University). He later taught at Purdue and Northwestern, joining the University of Texas in 1968. Charnes was director of the Center for Cybernetic Studies and the John P. Harbin Professor Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin. He was a Fellow of ORSA, AAAS, and the Econometric Society, a founder and past-president of TIMS, and for 10 years, from 1954 to 1964, was an editor of Management Science, first under the chairmanship of West Churchman and then Thrall.