L. R. Ford, Jr.

Lester Randolph Ford Jr. (September 23, 1927 – February 26, 2017) was an American mathematician specializing in network flow problems. He was the son of mathematician Lester R. Ford Sr. Ford's paper with D. R. Fulkerson on the maximum flow problem and the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm for solving it, published as a technical report in 1954 and in a journal in 1956, established the max-flow min-cut theorem. In 1962 they published Flows in Networks with Princeton University Press. According to the preface, it "included topics that were purely mathematically motivated, together with those that are strictly utilitarian in concept." In his review, S.W. Golomb wrote, "This book is an attractive, well-written account of a fairly new topic in pure and applied combinatorial analysis." As a topic of continued interest, a new edition was published in 2010 with a new foreword by Robert G. Bland and James B. Orlin. In 1956, Ford developed the Bellman–Ford algorithm for finding shortest paths in graphs that have negative weights, two years before Richard Bellman also published the algorithm. With Selmer M. Johnson, he developed the Ford–Johnson algorithm for sorting, which is of theoretical interest in connection with the problem of doing comparison sort with the fewest comparisons. For 20 years, this algorithm required the minimum number of comparisons.