Marguerite Frank

Marguerite Straus Frank
Born	1927 (age 96–97) France
Alma mater	Harvard University
Known for	Lie Algebra Mathematical programming
Spouse	Joseph Frank
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Thesis	New Simple Lie Algebras  (1956)
Doctoral advisor	Abraham Adrian Albert

Marguerite Straus Frank (born September 8, 1927), is an American-French mathematician, and pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.

Education and career

After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto, she contributed largely to the field of Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her PhD thesis, and to transportation theory. She was one of the first female PhD students in mathematics at Harvard University.

Together with Philip Wolfe in 1956 at Princeton, she invented the Frank–Wolfe algorithm, an iterative optimization method for general constrained non-linear problems. While linear programming was popular at that time, the paper marked an important change of paradigm to more general non-linear convex optimization. During that time, both Marguerite Frank and Philip Wolfe were part of the Princeton logistics project led by Harold W. Kuhn and Albert W. Tucker.

In 1977, she became an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, before moving to Rider University. Marguerite Frank was a visiting professor to Stanford (1985–1990), and ESSEC Business School in Paris (1991).

She was elected a member of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1981.

Personal life

Marguerite Frank was born in France and migrated to US during war in 1939. She was married to Joseph Frank, Professor of literature at Stanford, a biographer and critic of Dostoevsky.

Selected publications

• Frank, M (1954). "A New Class of Simple Lie Algebras". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 40 (8): 713–719. Bibcode:1954PNAS...40..713F. doi:10.1073/pnas.40.8.713.
• Frank, M.; Wolfe, P. (1956). "An algorithm for quadratic programming". Naval Research Logistics Quarterly. 3: 95. doi:10.1002/nav.3800030109.
• Frank, M. (1964). "Two New Classes of Simple Lie Algebras". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 112 (3): 456. doi:10.2307/1994156. JSTOR 1994156.
• Frank, M. (1973). "A New Simple Lie Algebra of Characteristic Three". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 38: 43. doi:10.2307/2038767. JSTOR 2038767.
• Frank, M. (1981). "The Braess paradox". Mathematical Programming. 20: 283. doi:10.1007/BF01589354.
• Frank, M.; Mladineo, R. H. (1993). "Computer generation of network cost from one link's equilibrium data". Annals of Operations Research. 44 (3): 261. doi:10.1007/BF02072642.