Martin Beale

Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale FRS (8 September 1928-1985) was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming.^[1]

Career

He was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and then joined the Mathematics Group at the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory, working under Stephen Vajda.^[2] In 1955 he extended George Dantzig's Simplex Algorithm to minimise a quadratic function.^[3]

In 1961 he became a founder member of a computer services company C.E.I.R (UK), which became Scicon,^[4] and in 1967 he became Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London.

He was Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society from 1974 to 1976, and Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1978 to 1980, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the International Statistical Institute. In 1979, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society "for his applications of mathematical and statistical techniques to industrial problems and for his contributions to the theory of mathematical programming", and he was elected to the Council of the Royal Society in 1984. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the Operational Research Society in 1980, and became Vice President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. He was also non-executive Chairman of Beale International Technology.^[2]

The Times suggested that he "used his blend of theory and state-of-the-art practice to encourage several generations of young mathematicians and computer scientists," and that his "many papers and his seminal book Mathematical Programming in Practice were major influences in their field, with their succinctness and clarity."^[2]

Memorials

• The Mathematical Programming Society awards the "Beale–Orchard-Hays" Prize in memory of him and of William Orchard-Hays.^[5]
• The OR Society awards the Beale Medal for "the most outstanding sustained contribution to Operational Research".^[6]
• A 2-day symposium was held in his memory at the Royal Society in 1987.^[7]
• The book Questions of Truth is dedicated to him and to Ruth Polkinghorne.^[8]
• He makes a cameo appearance in E.M. Delafield's A Provincial Lady Goes Further.^[9]

Publications

Beale produced over 100 scholarly papers^[10] and two books:

• Mathematical Programming in Practice, Pitman Publishing, London, 1968
• Introduction to Optimization, John Wiley & Sons, 1988, ISBN 0471917605, based on his lecture notes and working papers at Scicon and edited by his former colleague Lynne Mackley.

Notes and references

1. ^ "Royal Society Obituary". Royal Society. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0080-4606(198712)33%3C22%3AEMLB8S%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1. Retrieved 2007-04-15. 
2. ^ ^{a b c} Obituary in The Times Dec 28 1985, p8
3. ^ "On Minimizing A Convex Function Subject to Linear Inequalities," E. M. L. Beale Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), Vol. 17, No. 2 (1955), pp. 173-84. The extension also applied to other convex functions and to linear programming with random variables.
4. ^ See, e.g., bio in Introduction to Optimization. Scicon was subsequently bought by BP, and later sold to System Designers in the 1990s, and eventually to EDS
5. ^ MPS Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize
6. ^ OR Society website on Beale Medal
7. ^ Announcement in ACM Signum Newsletter
8. ^ Questions of Truth dedication page
9. ^ EM Delafield Website
10. ^ Google scholar

Persondata
Name	Beale, Martin
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	8 September 1928
Place of birth
Date of death	23-Dec-1985
Place of death	Windhover, Treyarnon Bay, nr Padstow

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