Michel Balinski

Brief Biography

Michel Louis Balinski was a major figure in operations research, mathematics, economics, and political science, best known for bringing OR methodology to bear on the electoral process. Balinski was born in Geneva, Switzerland to a family actively involved in international relations. His father was a Polish diplomat at the League of Nations and his grandfather, Ludwik Rajchman, was the founder of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. The Balinskis and Rajchmans fled the growing Nazi threat, leaving France via Spain and Portugal and reaching the United States in 1940. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Williams College and a master’s in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Balinski went on to Princeton University and studied under Albert W. Tucker and Ralph E. Gomory, earning a PhD in mathematics in 1959.

Balinski spent his first five postgraduate years at Princeton University, the consulting firm Mathematica, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1965, he was appointed a professor of mathematics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. During his time at CUNY, he served as chairman of the System and Decision Sciences area at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, spent sabbatical years at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and l’Université de Grenoble, and a year as an IBM World Trade Corporation Fellow in Paris. Balinski then relocated to Yale for several years before taking a permanent position as Directeur de recherche de classe exceptionnelle of the CNRS (its top research title, the equivalent of a chaired professorship) at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, where for a decade he was Director of the Laboratoire d’Econométrie. Concurrently, from 1983 to 1990, he was Leading Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and of Economics at SUNY Stony Brook, where he was founder and first Director of the Institute for Decisions Sciences (which later became The Center for Game Theory).

Balinski  made important contributions to linear and nonlinear programming, combinatorial optimization, and stable matching problems. In 1961, he proved “Balinski’s theorem” – a graph-theoretic property of the skeleton of multi-dimensional polytopes – and developed an algorithm for finding all vertices of a convex polyhedron. In 1970, he published one of the earliest papers on the closure problem (a graph-theoretic problem with applications in transportation planning, strip mining, defense, and scheduling jobs in a job shop). His 1965 Management Science article, “Integer Programming: Methods, Uses, Computation” was awarded INFORMS’s Frederick W. Lanchester Prize.

For all of his contributions to traditional OR, Balinski is best known for his research and publications on electoral systems. His 1982 book with H. P. Young has had direct practical application in apportioning the seats of assemblies to regions in several countries (including the UK). He conceived and developed “biproportional apportionment” that has been adopted (as of 2014) in five of Switzerland’s cantonal elections. His 2011 book with Rida Laraki proposes a new theory and method of voting called “majority judgment” where voters evaluate the merit of each candidate in a well-defined ordinal scale (instead of voting for one or several candidates, or rank-ordering them) and majorities determine society’s evaluation of each candidate and thereby its rank- ordering of them all. This, they prove, overcomes the most important drawbacks of the traditional theory of voting (including Arrow’s impossibility theorem). He has twice won the Mathematical Association of America’s Lester R. Ford Award for articles on voting, one in 1975 with H.P. Young on apportionment, the other in 2009 on how to avoid gerrymandering.

Balinski was a dedicated member of the Mathematical Programming Society (today’s Mathematical Optimization Society). He was one of the six founding members and was the founder and first editor-in-chief of its journal, Mathematical Programming (1970-1980). He went on to serve as MPS president for three years in the late 1980s.

Though he had retired from active teaching, Balinski continued to be active in research and has earned accolades from the OR community. In 2013, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) awarded him the John von Neumann Theory Prize, one of the highest honors an operations researcher can receive. He was celebrated for having “made major theoretical and practical contributions in both traditional and nontraditional areas of OR,” most importantly “in the domain of electoral decisions, namely, representation and apportionment on the one hand, and voting on the other.” The following year he was elected an INFORMS Fellow. Balinski is also a recipient of the George H. Hallett Award given by the APSA for his influential book with Young, Fair Representation: Meeting the Ideal of One-Man One-Vote (1982, 2001). In 2004, Balinski received an honorary doctorate in mathematics from the University of Augsburg.  He died in February 2019 after a long illness, during most of which he maintained an active involvement in research.

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for Michel Balinski

International Federation of Operational Research Societies. Michel Balinski. Accessed March 30, 2015. (link)

Balinski ML (2013) John von Neumann Theory Prize Acceptance Remarks.   Accessed June 13, 2017 (link)

Michel Balinski (2017) Interview by Louis Billera, July 19, 2017, Stonybrook, NY.

Michel Balinski Interview Transcript

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