13 Facts About Michel Balinski

Michel Balinski was known for his work in optimisation, convex polyhedra, stable matching, and the theory and practice of electoral systems, jury decision, and social choice.

Michel Balinski was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by INFORMS in 2013.

Michel Balinski maintained an active involvement in research and public appearances, his last public engagement took place in January 2019.

Michel Balinski was born in Geneva, Switzerland, the grandson of the Polish bacteriologist and founder of UNICEF, Ludwik Rajchman.

Michel Balinski was then appointed to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, first as associate professor then professor of mathematics.

In parallel with his academic work, Michel Balinski engaged in consulting as of the time he was a graduate student at Princeton.

Michel Balinski acted as a consultant elsewhere, including the Rand Corporation, Mobil Oil Research, the Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise, the Mayor's office of the City of New York, and Econ, Inc From 1975 to 1977 he was chairman of System and Decision Sciences at IIASA at Laxenburg, Austria.

In 1980 Michel Balinski settled in France, becoming Directeur de Recherche de classe exceptionnelle of the CNRS at the Laboratoire d'Econometrie of the Ecole Polytechnique in 1983.

Michel Balinski was a visiting professor at other institutions, including the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the Universite Scientifique et Medicale de Grenoble, the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, and INSEAD in Fontainebleau.

Michel Balinski was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Mathematical Programming in 1971, one of the founders of the Mathematical Optimization Society in 1970, and president of that society from 1986 to 1989.

Michel Balinski proved the Hirsch conjecture for several different classes of polytopes associated with the transportation problem, showed that the diameter of the skeleton of the assignment polytope viewed as a graph is 2, and found the polytope whose vertices are the stable matchings of the university admissions problem.

Michel Balinski has made important contributions to the theory of electoral systems, namely, representation and apportionment on the one hand, and voting on the other.

Michel Balinski conceived and developed with others "biproportional apportionment" that has been adopted in five of Switzerland's cantonal elections.