205 REVISTA INVESTIGACIÓN OPERACIONAL Vol. 26, No. 3, 2005 PROFESSOR GEORGE BERNARD DANTZIG, LIFE AND LEGEND Sira M. Allende and Carlos N. Bouza, Universidad de La Habana ABSTRACT A biographical sketch of Prof. Dantzig, recently dead, is given. He is considered as one of the founding fathers of Mathematical Programming. Key words: Linear Programming, Games Theory, Simplex Method. RESUMEN Se dan datos biográficos del recientemente fallecido Prof. Dantzig. Este es considerado como uno de los fundadores de la Programación Matemática. MSC: 90:00 1. GEORGE B. DANTZIG AND HIS RELATIVES Prof. George Bernard Dantzig passed away at his Stanford home at age 90 on 13 May 2005 in Palo Alto, California, due to complications from diabetes and cardiovascular disease. His death has been divulged by important newspapers and journals, see for example the articles of Scott and Devlin (2005), Holley (2005), Mintz (2005) and Pearce (2005). His wife and sons survive him. The international mathematical community deeply deplores his decease. His parents were Tobias Dantzig and Anja Ourisson. Tobias was born in Russia, but went to France for studying mathematics in Paris. Being there he received classes from Henry Poincaré. Anja studied mathematics in Paris when they met and got engaged. They emigrated to the United States where Tobias worked as lumberjack, road builder and painter before becoming a lecturer for a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Indiana. He made different contributions in mathematics being his most famous work “Number: the language of science”. It is a remarkable book. George helped him being a teenager by preparing some of the figures that appeared in the book. This oeuvre has been reprinted several times. His mother obtained a Master's degree in French and worked as linguist at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Tobias and Anja considered that names would influence in the future careers of their sons. Their first one was named "George Bernard" after Shaw because they wanted him to become a writer. George Bernard Dantzig was born the 8th of November 1914 in Portland, Oregon. The second son was named Henry after Poincaré, hoping he would be a mathematician. The family moved from Oregon to Washington D.C where Dantzig’s results in mathematics were, rather poor. Encouraged by his father he began to improve his marks in mathematics and in High School he became fascinated by geometry. His father gave him thousands of geometry problems. The mental capacity required to solve them were considered by George as a gift from is father and that the training obtained by solving these problems during high school days developed his analytic power. He met and married Anne Shmuner in 1936. 2. SCHOLARSHIP AND JOBS Dantzig studied mathematics at the University of Maryland where his father was teaching in the Mathematics Faculty. He obtained his Bachelor's degree there in 1936 and a Master's from the University of Michigan in 1937. Then he started his graduate studies there as a Horace Rackham Scholar being a student of T. H. Hildebrandt, R. L. Wilder and G. Y. Rainer.