L. R. Ford Jr.

Lester Randolph Ford Jr. (September 23, 1927 to February 26, 2017) was an American mathematician specializing in network flow problems, the son of mathematician Lester R. Ford Sr. His paper with D. R. Fulkerson on the maximum flow problem established the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm and the max-flow min-cut theorem, published as a technical report in 1954 and in a journal in 1956; their 1962 book Flows in Networks was published by Princeton University Press. In 1956 Ford developed the Bellman-Ford algorithm for finding shortest paths in graphs with negative weights, two years before Richard Bellman also published the algorithm. With Selmer M. Johnson he developed the Ford-Johnson algorithm for sorting, of theoretical interest for the problem of comparison sort with the fewest comparisons, which for twenty years required the minimum number of comparisons. In 1963, with his father, he published an innovative calculus textbook.