Steven Vajda
Encyclopedia
Steven Vajda played an important role in the development of mathematical programming
and operational research for more than fifty years. He was a member of a select circle of innovative researchers that included George Dantzig
, Abraham Charnes, W.W. Cooper, William Orchard-Hays, Martin Beale
and others. He worked and taught as an actuary and as a mathematician in operational research from 1925 to 1995.
From 1939 until his death in 1995, he lived in the U.K. where he was a defence scientist with the Royal Naval Scientific Service, and a Professor at Birmingham and Sussex Universities. He was a Companion of the Operational Research Society, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society
, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a member of the Mathematical Association
.
He is the author or coauthor of at least a dozen books on mathematical programming
, game theory
, manpower planning and statistics
and of many journal publications and conference papers. He was fluent in a number of languages, including English, German, Hungarian, and French and had a good grasp of several others. He taught and mentored generations of students in Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom.
in 1901, an Austro-Hungarian of the empire of Franz Joseph I of Austria
. His family moved to Vienna
in 1903, and it was in this city that Steven was raised and educated. Although he was a diligent and successful student, he did not expect to attend university because his family was of modest means. However, a period of massive inflation followed the end of the First World War, and the university fee schedule was not adjusted as the Austrian currency lost value. In this way, by the time Steven had finished school, the cost of a higher education had dropped and he was able to continue his studies. He read mathematics and received a Dr. Phil. Degree in 1925. One of his first appointments was in Romania where he was an actuarial advisor to the Romanian government. He eventually returned to Vienna to continue his work as an actuary and was married there in 1929.
In the early 20th century, Vienna was a hive of intellectual activity. It was the city of Sigmund Freud
, Alfred Adler
, Karl Popper
, Gábor Szegő
, Kurt Gödel
, Oskar Morgenstern
and so many others. It was a progressive society known as Rotes Wien (Red Vienna
) between 1918 and 1934, when the social democrats introduced such measures as the eight hour day, subsidized workers’ housing and reform of the education system. However, the 1930s also saw the rise of fascism
in Germany and Italy, and Austria was not exempt from this movement. In 1934 there was a brief civil war when the chancellor, Dollfuss, had the army shell parts of Vienna that were in the hands of a socialist militia. In 1938, Austria was occupied (the Anschluss
) and incorporated into Hitler’s German state. In 1939, Steven, wife Eva and their two children, Hedy and Robert, fled Austria. The children were sent to Sweden and Eva was admitted to the UK as a domestic servant, but Steven had to find another way to obtain an entry visa. Steven’s friend Karl Popper
had already left Austria and, as a New Zealand
resident and lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College, he found Steven a job and helped him to obtain the necessary travel documents. Steven was then able to enter England because he was merely in transit. The plan was to reunite the family in England and then leave for New Zealand, but before that could happen, the Second World War started and the Vajdas were briefly interned http://www.gov.im/mnh/heritage/library/bibliographies/internment.xml as “enemy aliens”. They were housed in a camp on the Isle of Man
with other refugees from across Europe. The internees organized a school for their children and, of course, Steven taught mathematics. Most of the internees were released after several months and Steven found employment as an actuary.
In 1964, Steven became Professor of Operational Research at the University of Birmingham
, where, along with K.B. Haley and others, he contributed his great strengths to the development of programs of study and research. He frequently invited well known colleagues such as Martin Beale
and Frank Harary
to speak to the staff and graduate students. He participated in various NATO-sponsored scientific summer schools as both a lecturer and an advisor. Upon his second “retirement” in 1967 he continued at Birmingham in a research appointment in mathematical statistics, working with Henry Daniels
The Guardian, David Wishart and Vic Barnett. He stayed until 1973, when, at the behest of Professor Pat Rivett http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/files/6556.pdf, he once again “retired” in order to become Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Sussex University. With colleagues such as H. Paul Williams, he lectured, supervised research and tutored students, wrote and attended seminars and conferences. He was sought after not only as a speaker at mathematics conferences but also as a simultaneous translator, because of his linguistic abilities and his understanding of the subject matter. He remained an active member of the Sussex staff until he died in 1995 in Brighton
.
Steven enjoyed the democratic spirit and freedom of movement that a British passport represented. Once, while attending a conference in Vienna while that city was still subject to a postwar, Soviet-supervised, neutrality, Steven was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. Several fellow mathematicians saw him remonstrating with the officer of the law and pointing to his passport. Later, his colleagues insisted that Steven was playing at not speaking German, but he said rather that he was affirming his right, as a British subject, to walk where and when he pleased.
Despite his dislike of some of the Austrian governments of the 20th century, Steven remained a Viennese, a Habsburg
-era Austro-Hungarian at heart. He was a man of great culture. The last time that I saw him, shortly before his death, my wife and I visited the Brighton Pavilion, now a museum, with him. Knowing that my wife is an art-history graduate, he turned to her and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “I am just a mathematician, tell me all about this building and the paintings it contains.” As it happened, she had in fact read a good deal about the Pavilion during her studies and she did quite well. Steven gave her a good grade, and then guided us through the galleries, speaking masterfully and in great detail about the paintings and of the relationships between trends in painting and music throughout the ages. His font of knowledge went far beyond mathematics.
Mathematical Programming
Mathematical Programming, established in 1971, and published by Springer Science+Business Media, is the official scientific journal of the Mathematical Optimization Society. It currently consists of two series: A and B. The "A" series contains general publications. The "B" series focuses on topical...
and operational research for more than fifty years. He was a member of a select circle of innovative researchers that included George Dantzig
George Dantzig
George Bernard Dantzig was an American mathematical scientist who made important contributions to operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics....
, Abraham Charnes, W.W. Cooper, William Orchard-Hays, Martin Beale
Martin Beale
Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale FRS was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming.-Career:...
and others. He worked and taught as an actuary and as a mathematician in operational research from 1925 to 1995.
From 1939 until his death in 1995, he lived in the U.K. where he was a defence scientist with the Royal Naval Scientific Service, and a Professor at Birmingham and Sussex Universities. He was a Companion of the Operational Research Society, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...
, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a member of the Mathematical Association
Mathematical Association
The Mathematical Association is a professional society concerned with mathematics education in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1871 as the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching and renamed to the Mathematical Association in 1897. It was the first teachers' subject organisation...
.
He is the author or coauthor of at least a dozen books on mathematical programming
Mathematical Programming
Mathematical Programming, established in 1971, and published by Springer Science+Business Media, is the official scientific journal of the Mathematical Optimization Society. It currently consists of two series: A and B. The "A" series contains general publications. The "B" series focuses on topical...
, game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
, manpower planning and statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
and of many journal publications and conference papers. He was fluent in a number of languages, including English, German, Hungarian, and French and had a good grasp of several others. He taught and mentored generations of students in Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Early life
Steven Vajda was born in BudapestBudapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
in 1901, an Austro-Hungarian of the empire of Franz Joseph I of Austria
Franz Joseph I of Austria
Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I was Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, King of Croatia, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Galicia and Lodomeria and Grand Duke of Cracow from 1848 until his death in 1916.In the December of 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria abdicated the throne as part of...
. His family moved to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
in 1903, and it was in this city that Steven was raised and educated. Although he was a diligent and successful student, he did not expect to attend university because his family was of modest means. However, a period of massive inflation followed the end of the First World War, and the university fee schedule was not adjusted as the Austrian currency lost value. In this way, by the time Steven had finished school, the cost of a higher education had dropped and he was able to continue his studies. He read mathematics and received a Dr. Phil. Degree in 1925. One of his first appointments was in Romania where he was an actuarial advisor to the Romanian government. He eventually returned to Vienna to continue his work as an actuary and was married there in 1929.
In the early 20th century, Vienna was a hive of intellectual activity. It was the city of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna...
, Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Gábor Szegő
Gábor Szego
Gábor Szegő was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the foremost analysts of his generation and made fundamental contributions to the theory of Toeplitz matrices and orthogonal polynomials.-Life:...
, Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the...
, Oskar Morgenstern
Oskar Morgenstern
Oskar Morgenstern was a German-born Austrian-School economist. He, along with John von Neumann, helped found the mathematical field of game theory ....
and so many others. It was a progressive society known as Rotes Wien (Red Vienna
Red Vienna
Red Vienna was the nickname of the capital of Austria between 1918 and 1934, when the Social Democrats had the majority and the city was democratically governed for the first time.-Social situation after World War I:...
) between 1918 and 1934, when the social democrats introduced such measures as the eight hour day, subsidized workers’ housing and reform of the education system. However, the 1930s also saw the rise of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in Germany and Italy, and Austria was not exempt from this movement. In 1934 there was a brief civil war when the chancellor, Dollfuss, had the army shell parts of Vienna that were in the hands of a socialist militia. In 1938, Austria was occupied (the Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
) and incorporated into Hitler’s German state. In 1939, Steven, wife Eva and their two children, Hedy and Robert, fled Austria. The children were sent to Sweden and Eva was admitted to the UK as a domestic servant, but Steven had to find another way to obtain an entry visa. Steven’s friend Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
had already left Austria and, as a New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
resident and lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College, he found Steven a job and helped him to obtain the necessary travel documents. Steven was then able to enter England because he was merely in transit. The plan was to reunite the family in England and then leave for New Zealand, but before that could happen, the Second World War started and the Vajdas were briefly interned http://www.gov.im/mnh/heritage/library/bibliographies/internment.xml as “enemy aliens”. They were housed in a camp on the Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
with other refugees from across Europe. The internees organized a school for their children and, of course, Steven taught mathematics. Most of the internees were released after several months and Steven found employment as an actuary.
Career in the United Kingdom
Meanwhile, mathematicians were in demand to staff the newly formed military operational research groups. H. Seal who was with the Admiralty O.R. group, had read Steven’s research publications in the Bulletin des actuaires suisses, and when he found that Steven was in England he sought him out and proposed that he join the war effort. This was not an easy hire, because Steven was still classed as an enemy alien, but Seal would not be denied and after much bureaucratic manoeuvring, Steven joined the Royal Naval Scientific Service of the British Admiralty. When the war ended, Seal saw to it that Steven was one of the first “aliens” to be given British citizenship. Steven stayed with the Admiralty until 1964, holding such appointments as Assistant Director of Operational Research and Head of the Mathematical Group. In 1964, he “retired” for the first time.In 1964, Steven became Professor of Operational Research at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, where, along with K.B. Haley and others, he contributed his great strengths to the development of programs of study and research. He frequently invited well known colleagues such as Martin Beale
Martin Beale
Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale FRS was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming.-Career:...
and Frank Harary
Frank Harary
Frank Harary was a prolific American mathematician, who specialized in graph theory. He was widely recognized as one of the "fathers" of modern graph theory....
to speak to the staff and graduate students. He participated in various NATO-sponsored scientific summer schools as both a lecturer and an advisor. Upon his second “retirement” in 1967 he continued at Birmingham in a research appointment in mathematical statistics, working with Henry Daniels
Henry Daniels
Henry Ellis Daniels FRS was a British statistician. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society , and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1984, following a Silver medal in 1947. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1980...
The Guardian, David Wishart and Vic Barnett. He stayed until 1973, when, at the behest of Professor Pat Rivett http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/files/6556.pdf, he once again “retired” in order to become Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Sussex University. With colleagues such as H. Paul Williams, he lectured, supervised research and tutored students, wrote and attended seminars and conferences. He was sought after not only as a speaker at mathematics conferences but also as a simultaneous translator, because of his linguistic abilities and his understanding of the subject matter. He remained an active member of the Sussex staff until he died in 1995 in Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
.
Vignettes
Steven Vajda had a lively spirit and a gentle sense of humour. He would sometimes tell stories about himself, such as his tale of crossing the Canadian border shortly after the war. Steven was on an official trip to the USA and he was, of course, using his new British passport, after several years without proper travel documents. He crossed into Canada to see Niagara Falls. Entering Canada with a British passport was no problem, but when he returned to the US, the border control officer looked at him unsympathetically, took his passport into his sentry box and thumbed through it. He then looked out at Steven and said in a stern voice, “Do you know what I’m going to do with your passport?” Steven, visions of a seized passport and internment flashing before him, offered a meek, “No… what?”, to which the officer replied “I’m going to stamp it.”Steven enjoyed the democratic spirit and freedom of movement that a British passport represented. Once, while attending a conference in Vienna while that city was still subject to a postwar, Soviet-supervised, neutrality, Steven was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. Several fellow mathematicians saw him remonstrating with the officer of the law and pointing to his passport. Later, his colleagues insisted that Steven was playing at not speaking German, but he said rather that he was affirming his right, as a British subject, to walk where and when he pleased.
Despite his dislike of some of the Austrian governments of the 20th century, Steven remained a Viennese, a Habsburg
Habsburg
The House of Habsburg , also found as Hapsburg, and also known as House of Austria is one of the most important royal houses of Europe and is best known for being an origin of all of the formally elected Holy Roman Emperors between 1438 and 1740, as well as rulers of the Austrian Empire and...
-era Austro-Hungarian at heart. He was a man of great culture. The last time that I saw him, shortly before his death, my wife and I visited the Brighton Pavilion, now a museum, with him. Knowing that my wife is an art-history graduate, he turned to her and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “I am just a mathematician, tell me all about this building and the paintings it contains.” As it happened, she had in fact read a good deal about the Pavilion during her studies and she did quite well. Steven gave her a good grade, and then guided us through the galleries, speaking masterfully and in great detail about the paintings and of the relationships between trends in painting and music throughout the ages. His font of knowledge went far beyond mathematics.
Works
- Theory of Games and Linear Programming(1956)
- Readings in Linear Programming (1958)
- Introduction to Linear Programming and the Theory of Games (1960)
- Mathematical Programming (1961)
- Mathematics of Experimental Design (1970)
- Probabilistic Programming (1972)
- Theory of Linear and Nonlinear Programming (1974)
- Mathematics of Manpower Planning (1978)
- Handbook of Applicable Mathematics: Supplement (1990), co-authored with Walter Ledermann, Emlyn Lloyd and Carol Alexander
- Mathematical Games and How to Play Them (1992)
- A Mathematical Kaleidoscope: Applications in Industry, Business and Science (1995), co-authored with by Brian Conolly
- Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers, and the Golden Section: Theory and Applications (2008)
Sources
Additionally, this article is based on the following publications and on over thirty years of personal communications.- Bather, John; Obituaries : Stefan Vajda; The Independent, (London), January 1, 1996
- Haley K.B. and Williams H.P; The work of Professor Steven Vajda 1901–1995; Journal of the Operational Research Society, Volume 49, Number 3, 1 March 1998 , p. 298-301; *Shutler, M.; Editorial: The life of Steven Vajda; IMA; J Management Math.1997; 8: 193-194; http://imaman.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/8/3/193.pdf
- Author’s biography appearing in Mathematical Programming (by Steven Vajda), Addison-Wesley, 1961