The daughters of Dr. Marguerite Straus Frank informed me over the recent holiday season that she had passed away at the age of 97 on December 11, 2024 in Palo Alto.
I quickly notified Professor Immanuel M. Bomze, the Editor in Chief of the EURO Journal on Computational Optimization (EJCO), of this sad news and he then asked me to partner with him in composing an In Memoriam for Marguerite for EJCO.
Marguerite had been a friend and I even had a photo of her in my presentation on the panel, "What Our Past Can Tell Us About Our Future," that took place at the INFORMS Seattle meeting in October, and that I had written about; see https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/11/many-thanks-to-informs-history.html
Despite it being the holiday period, Immanuel and I managed to write the In Memoriam and it did take a lot of research to ensure accuracy. We were in communications with her daughters: Dr. Claudine Frank and Dr. Isabelle Frank. Since Marguerite and I shared some common research interests, writing the In Memoriam brought back many memories, including when she visited me at the Isenberg School and when I hosted her talk at MIT, when I held an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women there.
We completed the In Memoriam, but the publisher had "technical difficulty," and it took almost 3 weeks to receive the galleys. Luckily, it was quickly published online. Plus, the In Memoriam is open access.
You may read and download it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2192440625000012?via%3Dihub
We shared the In Memoriam with the daughters and they were very appreciative.
Marguerite is best known for being the co-developer of the Frank-Wolfe (1956) algorithm. She faced challenges as a female in STEM but left a lasting legacy. I enjoyed our discussions on the Braess Paradox, which was even a theme in my doctoral dissertation at Brown University.
I am also very grateful to Immanuel Bomze for spearheading an annual paper prize in his journal named after Marguerite. As he wrote to her daughters: "We will keep the memory alive, also with the help of the annual EJCO Award." More info can be found in the In Memoriam.
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