Leonid Khachiyan

Leonid Genrikhovich Khachiyan was a Soviet and American mathematician and computer scientist, born in Leningrad in 1952. In 1979 he devised the ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming, the first algorithm shown to solve linear programs in polynomial time, work for which he received the Fulkerson Prize in 1982. After earning his doctorate at the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he later became a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, where he remained until his death in 2005.