Fields Mathematics Alma mater Harvard University Role Mathematician | Name Marguerite Frank Spouse Joseph Frank | |
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Thesis New Simple Lie Algebras (1956) Known for Lie algebra, Mathematical optimization | ||
Doctoral advisor Abraham Adrian Albert | ||
Marguerite frank inventor of the frank wolfe algorithm honorary discussion panel
Marguerite Straus Frank (born September 8, 1927) is an American-French mathematician who is a pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.
Contents
- Marguerite frank inventor of the frank wolfe algorithm honorary discussion panel
- Education and career
- Personal life
- Selected publications
- References
Education and career
After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto, Frank contributed largely to the fields of transportation theory and Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her PhD thesis, New Simple Lie Algebras. She was one of the first female PhD students in mathematics at Harvard University, completing her dissertation in 1956, with Abraham Adrian Albert as her advisor.
Together with Philip Wolfe in 1956 at Princeton, she invented the Frank–Wolfe algorithm, an iterative optimization method for general constrained non-linear problems. While linear programming was popular at that time, the paper marked an important change of paradigm to more general non-linear convex optimization. During that time, both Marguerite Frank and Philip Wolfe were part of the Princeton logistics project led by Harold W. Kuhn and Albert W. Tucker.
In 1977, she became an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, before moving to Rider University. Marguerite Frank was a visiting professor to Stanford (1985–1990), and ESSEC Business School in Paris (1991).
She was elected a member of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1981.
Personal life
Marguerite Frank was born in France and migrated to U.S. during war in 1939. She was married to Joseph Frank from 1953 until his death in 2013. He was a Professor of literature at Stanford and a biographer and critic of Dostoevsky.