Polynomial Time Algorithm for the Transportation Problem Eva Tardos gave the first strongly polynomial time algorithm for the transportation problem. She was awarded the Fulkerson Prize for this result in 1988. Routing Algorithm Eva Tardos, in joint work with Phil Klein, Serge Plotkin, and Cliff Stein, developed a radically new approach for solving routing and multicommodity flow problems very efficiently. This work led to a routing algorithm for permanent virtual circuits in private networks that has been incorporated into ATM switches currently produced by Lucent. Failure Detectors Sam Toueg, in collaboration with Tushar Chandra, introduced unreliable failure detectors and showed that they can be used to solve several fundamental problems, including Consensus and Atomic Broadcast.
Failure detectors are now at the core of many fault-tolerant applications and systems.
Mesh Generation Algorithm Steve Vavasis, in joint work with Scott Mitchell, developed the first mesh generation algorithm for general three-dimensional domains with provable quality bounds.