William R. Pulleyblank

William R. Pulleyblank is a Canadian and American operations researcher. He is a professor of operations research at the United States Military Academy (West Point), where he also holds the Class of 1950 Chair of Advanced Technology.^[1]

Pulleyblank obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in 1973; his thesis, supervised by Jack Edmonds, concerned perfect matching theory from the point of view of polyhedral combinatorics.^[2] He worked at IBM beginning in the late 1960s and then returned to academia in 1974,^[3] as a professor at the University of Calgary, before moving back to Waterloo in 1982.^[4] At Waterloo, he held the CP/NSERC Chair of Optimization and Computer Applications.^[1][4] In 1990 he began a second stint at IBM, where his work included leading the Blue Gene project.^[1][3] He was promoted to vice president in 2004,^[4] and retired from IBM in 2010, at which time he joined the West Point faculty.^[4][5]

In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.^[6] The College of Saint Rose, in Albany, New York, and McMaster University, in Ontario, Canada, have both given Pulleyblank honorary degrees. He is also a recipient of the Alberta Centennial Medal, a fellow of INFORMS, and (since 2010) a member of the National Academy of Engineering.^[1][7]