Michel Balinski (CNRS and Ecole Polytechnique Paris)
SHORT BIO
Michel Balinski studied mathematics at Williams College, economics at MIT, and completed his PhD in mathematics at Princeton in 1959. He has taught in departments of economics, mathematics and administrative sciences at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, CUNY Graduate Center, Yale, and SUNY Stony Brook. Since 1982 he has been Directeur de recherche de classe exceptionnelle of the CNRS at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He is the founding editor of Mathematical Programming and a past President of the Mathematical Optimization Society. He was awarded INFORMS’s Lanchester Prize in 1965, the MAA’s Lester R. Ford Award in 1975 and 2009, the APSA’s George H. Hallet Award in 2008, and INFORMS’s John von Neumann Theory Prize in 2013.
After years of working in optimization – in particular, combinatorial – his research interests have focused on the design of fair electoral systems and the theory and applications of ranking contestants and candidates. He devised a system of voting now used in the parliaments of the city and the canton of Zürich, Switzerland.