Egon Balas
Egon Balas (June 7, 1922 in Cluj, Romania – March 18, 2019) was an applied mathematician and a professor of industrial administration and applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and did fundamental work in developing integer and disjunctive programming. Life and education. Balas was born in Cluj (Romania) in a Hungarian Jewish family. His original name was Blatt, which was first changed to the Hungarian Balázs and then later to the Romanian Balaş. He was married to art historian Edith Balas, a  survivor of Auschwitz, with whom he had two daughters. He was imprisoned by the Communist authorities for several years after the war. He left Romania in 1966 and accepted an appointment with Carnegie Mellon University in 1967. Balas obtained a "Diploma Licentiate" in economics (Bolyai University, 1949) and Ph.D.s in economics (University of Brussels, 1967) and mathematics (University of Paris, 1968). His mathematics PhD thesis was titled "Minimax et dualité en programmation discrète" and was written under the direction of Robert Fortet.