Jewish Recipients of the von Neumann Theory Prize

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Listed below are recipients of the John von Neumann Theory Prize who were, or are, Jewish (or of partial Jewish descent, as noted). This award recognizes outstanding contributions in operations research, a mathematical and computational discipline concerned with the optimal solution of complex problems in management science.

George B. Dantzig (1975)
Richard Bellman (1976)
Felix Pollaczek (1977)
David Gale (1980)
Abraham Charnes (1982)
William Cooper¹ (1982)
Herbert Scarf (1983)
Ralph Gomory² (1984)
Kenneth Arrow (1986)
Samuel Karlin (1987)
Herbert Simon³ (1988)
Harry Markowitz (1989)
Richard Karp (1990)
Frank Proschan (1991)
Alan Hoffman (1992)
Philip Wolfe⁴ (1992)
Robert Herman (1993)
Egon Balas (1995)
Cyrus Derman (2002)
Arkadi Nemirovski (2003)
Robert Aumann (2005)
George Nemhauser (2012)
Laurence Wolsey⁵ (2012)
Nimrod Megiddo (2014)
Martin Reiman (2016)
Donald Goldfarb (2017)
Alexander Shapiro (2021)

NOTES
1. Jewish mother (née Rachael Rossman).
2. In his book Indiscrete Thoughts (Birkhäuser, Boston, 1997, p. 18), Gian-Carlo Rota recalls his fellow Princeton student Ralph Gomory as a "red-blooded American boyish Wasp type." In fact, Ralph Gomory's mother (née Marian Schellenberg) was from a prominent German-Jewish family that was among the founders of Beth Elohim Congregation in Brooklyn, NY. Marian Gomory's sister Rhoda Schaap was a President of the Brooklyn, NY Section of the National Council of Jewish Women.
3. Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life, by Herbert A. Simon (BasicBooks, New York, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262).
4. Jewish father.
5. Mother, Anna Wolsey-Mautner, was the daughter of the Viennese industrialist and folklorist Konrad David Mautner and his wife Anna (née Neumann) Mautner, both Jewish.

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