Egon Balas, 1922-2019

I only now learned that Egon Balas passed away in March, at the age of 96.  

I last saw him in 2017, full of energy at an IFORS conference in Quebec City. We became friends in Pittsburgh, where he was the leader of the OR community at CMU.

He came to operations research in the second half of his life, after an incredibly dramatic first half.  Here's a link to his CMU obituary:

March 19, 2019, Remembering Egon Balas

"His early life included two imprisonments—one for joining the communist party to oppose the Nazis during World War II and the second by the communist party after the war in a Stalinist purge. He later became one of the world’s foremost experts in mathematical optimization after joining Carnegie Mellon in 1967."

Here's the WSJ obituary:

Egon Balas, Jailed and Tortured in Romania, Found Salvation in Math

After losing his faith in Marxism, academic discovered a genius for devising algorithms and solving business problems

And here's the obit from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Obituary: Egon Balas | WW II freedom fighter became ‘legendary scholar’ at CMU