Marguerite Frank

Marguerite Straus Frank was a French-American mathematician who was a pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.

Education

After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto, Frank contributed largely to the fields of transportation theory and Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her PhD thesis, New Simple Lie Algebras. She was one of the first female PhD students in mathematics at Harvard University, completing her dissertation in 1956, with Abraham Adrian Albert as her advisor.

Contributions

Together with Philip Wolfe in 1956 at Princeton, she invented the Frank–Wolfe algorithm, an iterative optimization method for general constrained non-linear problems.

Personal life

Marguerite Frank was born in France and migrated to U.S. during the war in 1939. She was married to Joseph Frank from 1953 until his death in 2013. He was a professor of literature at Stanford and an author of widely acclaimed critical biography of Dostoevsky. Frank died on December 11, 2024, at the age of 97.

Selected publications

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