A 12-year-old mathematics student glances nervously at the 20 unfamiliar children around him and tentatively raises his hand. It's a new and uncomfortable situation. The boy's math teacher parents, looking for travel and adventure, recently moved the family from their home in France to the old French colonial town of Pondicherry, India. Trickier yet, the teacher at the front of the class is none other than his mother.

Gérard Cornuéjols has always been at the top of his math classes—not surprising given his background. But he has a different way of looking at things. A more intuitive way, somehow grasping the bigger picture, the whole puzzle. His methodical mother, though, has a tendency to correct her only son when he skips over steps to get right to the solution, especially in her classroom.

Cornuéjols, thankfully, answers the question perfectly, then buries himself back in his book.

Four years later, the family moves back to France. Cornuéjols finishes high school and moves on to college to study civil engineering. Still fascinated with solving puzzles, he concentrates on traffic network flows. This leads him to a doctorate in operations research, a field dedicated to developing methods for optimizing solutions to complex problems, from military strategy to auctions for airport landing rights. After graduation, he joins the Tepper School faculty at Carnegie Mellon, where he remains today after 30 productive years.

The world has taken notice of Cornuéjols' many contributions to the field. The IBM university professor of operations research was recently honored with the prestigious George B. Dantzig prize, an award given only every three years by the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Melissa Silmore (TPR'85)