D. R. Fulkerson

Delbert Ray Fulkerson (August 14, 1924 – January 10, 1976) was a mathematician who co-developed the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, one of the most well-known algorithms to solve the maximum flow problem in networks.

Fulkerson was brought up in small-town southern Illinois and became an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University. His academic career was interrupted by military service during World War II. Having returned to complete his degree after the war he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of Cyrus MacDuffee, a student of L. E. Dickson.

Fulkerson received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1951. He was then with the mathematics department at the Rand Corporation until 1971 when he moved to Cornell as the Maxwell Upson Professor of Engineering. He remained at Cornell until he committed suicide in 1976.

In 1956, he published his noted paper on the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm^[1] together with Lester Randolph Ford. In 1979, the renowned Fulkerson Prize was established which is now awarded every three years for outstanding papers in discrete mathematics jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society.

References

1. ^ L. R. Ford; D. R. Fulkerson (1962). Flows in Networks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

External links

• Delbert Ray Fulkerson prize
• Fulkerson biography at Cornell

Persondata
Name	Fulkerson, D. R.
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Date of birth	August 14, 1924
Place of birth
Date of death	January 10, 1976
Place of death