Robert G. Bland

Robert Gary Bland (born February 25, 1948) is an American mathematician and operations researcher, a professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University.[1] He was born in New York City.[2]

Bland did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Cornell University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969, M.S. in 1972, and a Ph.D. in 1974 under the supervision of D. R. Fulkerson.[1][3] He began his faculty career at Binghamton University, but then returned to Cornell in 1978.[1]

Bland is known as one of the inventors of oriented matroids, which he used to define Bland's rule for avoiding cycles in the simplex method for linear programming.[4][5]

  1. ^ a b c Faculty profile, Cornell University, retrieved 2012-02-25.
  2. ^ American men and women of science: 1989-1990 : A biographical directory of today's leaders in physical, biological and related sciences. 1989. ISBN 9780835225694.
  3. ^ Robert Gary Bland at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ Björner, Anders (1999), Oriented Matroids, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and Its Applications, vol. 46, Cambridge University, ISBN 978-0-521-77750-6. Page 150: "It seems fair to say that the major credit for the origination of oriented matroid theory should be shared by Robert Bland, Jon Folkman, Michel Las Vergnas, and Jim Lawrence." This authoritative reference on oriented matroids discusses Bland's pivoting-rule on page 418.
  5. ^ Bland, Robert G. (May 1977). "New finite pivoting rules for the simplex method". Mathematics of Operations Research. 2 (2): 103–107. doi:10.1287/moor.2.2.103. JSTOR 3689647. MR 0459599. S2CID 18493293.