Marguerite Frank

Marguerite Straus Frank
Born (1927-09-08) September 8, 1927 (age 97)
France
Alma materHarvard University
Known forLie algebra
Mathematical programming
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1953; died 2013)​
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Thesis New Simple Lie Algebras  (1956)
Doctoral advisorAbraham Adrian Albert

Marguerite Straus Frank (born September 8, 1927) is a French-American mathematician who is a pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.

Education

After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto,[1] Frank contributed largely to the fields of transportation theory and Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her PhD thesis, New Simple Lie Algebras.[2] She was one of the first female PhD students in mathematics at Harvard University,[3] completing her dissertation in 1956, with Abraham Adrian Albert as her advisor.[2]

Contributions

Together with Philip Wolfe in 1956 at Princeton, she invented the Frank–Wolfe algorithm,[4] an iterative optimization method for general constrained non-linear problems.

Personal life

Marguerite Frank was born in France and migrated to U.S. during the war in 1939.[1] She was married to Joseph Frank from 1953 until his death in 2013. He was a Professor of literature at Stanford and an author of widely acclaimed critical biography of Dostoevsky.[5]

Selected publications

  • Frank, M (1954). "A New Class of Simple Lie Algebras". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 40 (8): 713–719. Bibcode:1954PNAS...40..713S. doi:10.1073/pnas.40.8.713. PMC 534147. PMID 16589544.
  • Frank, M.; Wolfe, P. (1956). "An algorithm for quadratic programming". Naval Research Logistics Quarterly. 3 (1–2): 95–110. doi:10.1002/nav.3800030109.
  • Frank, M. (1964). "Two New Classes of Simple Lie Algebras". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 112 (3): 456–482. doi:10.2307/1994156. JSTOR 1994156.
  • Frank, M. (1973). "A New Simple Lie Algebra of Characteristic Three". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 38 (1): 43–46. doi:10.2307/2038767. JSTOR 2038767.
  • Frank, M. (1981). "The Braess paradox". Mathematical Programming. 20: 283–302. doi:10.1007/BF01589354. S2CID 206800589.
  • Frank, M.; Mladineo, R. H. (1993). "Computer generation of network cost from one link's equilibrium data". Annals of Operations Research. 44 (3): 261. doi:10.1007/BF02072642. S2CID 33907141.

References

  1. ^ a b Albert-Goldberg, Nancy (2005). A3 & His Algebra: How a Boy from Chicago's West Side Became a Force in American Mathematics. iUniverse. p. 348. ISBN 9781469726397.
  2. ^ a b "Marguerite Josephine Straus Frank". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  3. ^ Assad, Arjang A; Gass, Saul I (2011). Profiles in operations research: pioneers and innovators. Boston, MA: Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 9781441962812.
  4. ^ Frank, M.; Wolfe, P. (1956). "An algorithm for quadratic programming". Naval Research Logistics Quarterly. 3 (1–2): 95–110. doi:10.1002/nav.3800030109.
  5. ^ "Joseph Frank, Biographer of Dostoevsky, Dies at 94". New York Times. 4 March 2013. Retrieved 13 March 2014.