George J. Minty

George James Minty Jr. (September 16, 1929, Detroit – August 6, 1986, Bloomington, Indiana) was an American mathematician, specializing in mathematical analysis and discrete mathematics. He is known for the Klee–Minty cube, the Browder–Minty theorem, the introduction of oriented regular matroids, and the Minty-Vitaver theorem on graph coloring.

Biography

George Minty Jr. grew up in Detroit. His father emigrated, after WW I, from Scotland to work in Detroit's automotive industry as a tool and die maker. George Minty Jr. received his bachelor's degree from Detroit's Wayne State University. After service in the US Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, he became in 1956 a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Michigan. There he received in 1959 his PhD with thesis Integrability Conditions for Vector Fields in Banach Spaces supervised by Erich Rothe. As a postdoc in 1959 he was briefly a visiting researcher at Tokyo's Waseda University.

According to K.-C. Chang:

In 2012 D. Erdős, A. Frank, and K. Kun published a sharpening of Minty's coloring theorem (published in 1962 in The American Mathematical Monthly).

Selected publications

Abstract of How good is the simplex method?