Obituaries: Alexander Grothendieck (1928–2014)

More will be told of this story as his voluminous writings from the hinterland are being read. But between 1945 and 1970 he published mathematics of unparalleled sweep and power, conveying escalations of abstraction to the solution of concrete problems, and this is the part we wish to appreciate.

Alexander Grothendieck 1928–2014 | Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP.

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Obituaries: Harold Kuhn (1925–2014)

Kuhn enrolled at Princeton in the fall of 1947. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in group theory under the direction of Ralph Fox. Concurrently, he joined mathematics professor A.W. Tucker and fellow graduate student David Gale in a hastily organized summer project to study the suspected equivalence between linear programming and matrix game theory. That project, he later wrote, “set the course of my subsequent academic career, which has centered around the applications of mathematics to economics.” In 1980, the three shared the John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Operations Research Society of America (now part of INFORMS) for their pioneering work in game theory and optimization.

Obituaries: Harold Kuhn (1925–2014).