Jack Edmonds is one of the creators of combinatorial optimization. He
attended George Washington University before pursuing graduate study at
the University of Maryland. He received his master's degree in 1959 and
began work at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). He moved to the
University of Waterloo in 1969, where he supervised a dozen PhD
students. Throughout his career, he has influenced and assisted numerous
young researchers. In the 1960s, Jack Edmonds developed a theory of
matroid partition and intersection that still stands as one of the most
profound and thorough explorations in the field. He illustrated the deep
interconnections between combinatorial minmax theorems, polyhedral
structure, duality theory, and efficient algorithms. He published many
influential papers on these topics, with the one published in 1972 on
theoretical improvements in algorithmic efficiency for network flow
problems with Richard Karp leading to one of the most well known
algorithms among nowadays CS students. He was awarded the John von
Neumann Theory Prize for his contributions as a researcher and educator
in 1985. Jack Edmonds retired from teaching in 1999 and was elected
into the inaugural Fellows class of the Institute for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences.