Ailsa Land

Ailsa H. Land (née Dicken; born 14 June 1927)[1] is an Emeritus Professor of Operational Research in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics. She is most well-known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm along with Alison Doig whilst carrying out research at the London School of Economics in 1960.[2][3] She is married to Frank Land who is also an Emeritus Professor at the LSE.[4]

Ailsa Land
Born
Ailsa Dicken

(1927-06-14) 14 June 1927
West Bromwich, Staffordshire, England
EducationMalvern Collegiate Institute
Alma materLondon School of Economics
Known forBranch and bound algorithm
Spouse(s)Frank Land
Scientific career
FieldsOperations research
InstitutionsLondon School of Economics

Education

Land obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics in 1956, her dissertation was entitled An Application of the Techniques of Linear Programming to the Transportation of Coal, supervised by George Morton.[5]

Integer programming

Land worked with Helen Makower, Alison Doig and George Morton in the late 1950s on a number of integer programming problems such as the travelling salesman problem and aircraft scheduling.[6] However these were seemingly too complex to solve.

British Petroleum commissioned Land and Doig to investigate using discrete variables within linear programming models. Through this investigation they developed the branch and bound algorithm for solving integer problems. This solution method is now the most prevalent solution method for NP-hard optimisation problems.

Land implemented her linear and integer programming algorithms in Fortran. Later, with Susan Powell, she collected her implementations in a book, Fortran Codes for Mathematical Programming: Linear, Quadratic and Discrete (Wiley, 1973).[7]

Awards and honours

Land was awarded with the Harold Larnder prize by the Canadian Operational Research Society in 1994 for achieving international distinction in operational research.[8]

A student award at the London School of Economics, the Ailsa Land Prize, is given annually in her honour.[9]

gollark: Look, it made sense at the time.
gollark: The ++become_sentient command?
gollark: It became sentient ages ago.
gollark: It's not even in the source, I livepatched the bot.
gollark: Nope!

References
  1. "Ailsa H. Land". History of O.R. Excellence. INFORMS. Retrieved 24 June 2020.
  2. A. H. Land and A. G. Doig (1960). "An automatic method of solving discrete programming problems". Econometrica. 28 (3). pp. 497–520. doi:10.2307/1910129.
  3. "Staff News". www.lse.ac.uk. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  4. "NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Frank Land Interviewed by Thomas Lean" (PDF). British Library Sounds. May–June 2010.
  5. Ailsa Land at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. Jünger, Michael; Liebling, Thomas M.; Naddef, Denis; Nemhauser, George L.; Pulleyblank, William R.; Reinelt, Gerhard; Rinaldi, Giovanni; Wolsey, Laurence A. (6 November 2009). 50 Years of Integer Programming 1958-2008: From the Early Years to the State-of-the-Art. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9783540682790.
  7. Birtwistle, D. T. (July 1975). "Review of Fortran Codes for Mathematical Programming". Journal of the Operational Research Society. 26 (2): 345–346. doi:10.1057/jors.1975.73. Also reviewed by Birtwistle in Operational Research Quarterly, JSTOR 3008473.
  8. "Harold Larnder Prize | Canadian Operational Research Society
    Société canadienne de recherche opérationnelle"    . www.cors.ca. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  9. "Ailsa Land Prize". London School of Economics. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
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