D.R. Fulkerson Centennial Celebration

A Fitting Tribute

Delbert Ray Fulkerson’s tragic and unexpected death at the age of fifty-one dealt his many friends, colleagues, and students a severe blow. He was one of the pioneering giants in the development of modern operations research, and his fundamental contributions in network flow theory and combinatorial analysis have had and will continue to have a major and lasting impact on the field. Over and above his scientific abilities, Ray was a man of outstanding personal qualities. He was warm, kind, and friendly, with great compassion for the needs of his fellow man. He was a person of great integrity, a strong and constant advocate of justice and fair play, but always modest and unpretentious. At the same time he was an active and skillful competitor, whether it was at tennis or kriegspiel or in the dogged pursuit of the solution of a difficult mathematical problem. Those who had the privilege of knowing Ray greatly respected him for his outstanding human attributes as well as for his intellectual talents. (You can read a full biography of Ray Fulkerson on the INFORMS site.)

Cornell’s Centennial Celebration program started with a general-audience public lecture highlighting the formative achievements of Fulkerson and his collaborators on foundations of both pure and computational mathematics in several important areas, as well as the profound real-world impact of Fulkerson’s work. This talk was followed by three more technical surveys that described progress in key areas to which he contributed: discrete optimization via integer programming; network flows; and extremal combinatorics, perfect graphs & related polyhedra.

We invited collaborators, students, colleagues of Fulkerson, and the subsequent generations of scholars in these areas whose work has been influenced by this foundational work, including all Cornell faculty, students over the years. It was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect in celebrating Fulkerson’s legacy.