Uriel G. Rothblum

Brief Biography

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Uriel George Rothblum was raised in a household that emphasized the traditional European upbringing with music, performing arts, and poetry. At a young age, Rothblum demonstrated a passion and talent for the sciences, especially chemistry. He completed his mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces and went on to study applied mathematics at Tel Aviv University. There, his master’s thesis was supervised by future Nobel Prize-winning game theorist Robert J. Aumann. Rothblum came to the United States to pursue graduate work in Operations Research at Stanford University where his PhD dissertation was supervised by Arthur F. Veinott, Jr. After a year as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Courant Institute of New York University, Rothblum joined School of Organization and Management at Yale.

With Veinott, Rothblum made contributions to normalized Markov population decision chains. He showed that there is a stationary policy with simultaneous maximum present value for all small positive interest rate and gave an efficient finite policy-improvement method for finding such as policy. Rothblum’s work on Markov decisions processes continued into the Yale years as he began collaborating with a number of his students, namely Moshe Haviv. The pair authored three papers on matrix analysis, using mathematical programming techniques.

In 1984, Rothblum left Yale to join the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. In 1985, he published a novel presentation and interpretation of the Shapley value that is remembered as one of his significant contributions to the field of game theory. In 1988, Rothblum accepted visiting and consulting positions at the Rutgers Center for Operations Research and AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He kept up an association with Stanford University as a Visiting Professor in the summers of 1982 through 1999.

Rothblum held a number of editorial positions for operations research publications. He served on the editorial boards of Linear Programming and its Applications (1982-2012), Mathematics of Operations Research (1979-2008), Operations Research (1996-1999), the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (1988-1993), and the SIAM Journal on Algebraic and Discrete Mathematics (1983-1987). Rothblum was a two-time recipient of the Operations Research Meritorious Service Award for his continued support and contributions to the journal. From 2009 until his death, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics of Operations Research. Rothblum’s other service to the professional OR community includes a three year tenure as President of the Operations Research Society of Israel.

Rothblum received a number of honors in his lifetime. He was an elected Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. In 2005, the Operations Research Society of Israel awarded him the ORSIS Prize for Excellence in OR for his paper on convex combinatorial optimization.

After Rothblum’s death in 2012, Raphael Lowey of Technion’s Department of Mathematics published a special article in Linear Algebra and its Applications to commemorate his research contributions. The tribute included passing thoughts from many of Rothblum’s colleagues and collaborators including Veinott, Haviv, and Frank Hwang. 

Other Biographies

Lowey R. (2012) Uriel G. Rothblum (1947-2012). Linear Algebra and its Applications. 437(12): 2997-3009. (link)

University of St. Andrews School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences. Uriel George Rothblum. Accessed May 22, 2015. (link)