The 100th anniversary of Fulkerson’s Birthday

Joseph Cheriyan is on the faculty in the Combinatorics & Optimization Department of the University of Waterloo—see here.

He is also an organizer of the conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ray Fulkerson’s birthday (August 14, 1924). It is planned for July 17-19, 2024 at Waterloo.

Cornell University will host a parallel event, from September 20, 21, 2024 that will also focus on the life and contributions of Fulkerson. While the two events are independent, we are coordinating with the organizers of the two events.

Cheriyan asked if we could help announce the conference being organized to honor Fulkerson. So we will.

The Conference at Waterloo

Here is a summary of the conference:

Fulkerson 100 is a meeting organized to celebrate Fulkerson’s legacy and impact in discrete mathematics, especially in the fields of graph theory, optimization, and operations research. The workshop will feature invited talks in graph theory, combinatorics, optimization, and theoretical computer science, given by some of the foremost researchers in these areas. It will also feature lightning talks and a poster session devoted to students and postdocs. By bringing together various leading researchers in discrete mathematics with junior researchers and students, the workshop aims to boost research in the areas pioneered by Fulkerson, while (implicitly) commemorating his vision and contributions.

The Algorithm

Fulkerson was an American mathematician who co-developed the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, one of the most well-known algorithms to solve the maximum flow problem in networks. L. R. Ford Jr. published it in 1956 with Fulkerson here. It made fundamental and lasting contributions to combinatorial mathematics, optimization, and operations research.

In 1962 they produced a book-length description of their method. In 1971 Fulkerson moved to Cornell University as the Maxwell Upson Professor of Engineering. He was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and was limited in his teaching. In despair, he committed suicide in 1976.

A Related Problem

Jack Edmonds and Richard Karp created in computer science, the Edmonds-Karp algorithm which is an implementation of the Ford-Fulkerson method for computing the maximum flow in a flow network. See here.

The algorithm was first published by Yefim Dinitz in 1970, and independently published by Edmonds and Karp in 1972. Dinitz’s algorithm includes additional techniques that reduced the running time.

Open Problems

Thanks to Waterloo and Cornell for these interesting conferences. Thanks to Cheriyan for his work on the Waterloo version.