Theodore Motzkin

Theodore Samuel Motzkin (1908 to 1970) was an Israeli-American mathematician. He grew up in Berlin, entered university at fifteen and received his doctorate in 1934 from the University of Basel under Alexander Ostrowski, with a thesis on linear inequalities that made an important contribution to the young theory of linear programming, although its importance was recognized only after an English translation appeared in 1951. He joined the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1935, was an invited speaker at the 1936 International Congress of Mathematicians, and worked as a cryptographer for the British government during the Second World War. In 1948 he moved to the United States, spent two years at Harvard and Boston College, and from 1950 taught at UCLA, becoming a professor in 1960. The Motzkin transposition theorem, Motzkin numbers, the Motzkin-Taussky theorem and Fourier-Motzkin elimination are named after him, and he first developed the double description algorithm of polyhedral combinatorics and computational geometry.