| Richard Duffin | |
| Birth Date: | 1909 |
| Birth Place: | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Nationality: | American |
| Fields: | Physics |
| Workplaces: | Carnegie Mellon University Purdue University |
| Alma Mater: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Harold Mott-Smith David Bourgin |
| Doctoral Students: | Raoul Bott Hans Weinberger |
| Known For: | Work on electrical network theory DKP algebra Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture Bott–Duffin synthesis |
| Awards: | John von Neumann Theory Prize (1982) |
Richard James Duffin (1909 – October 29, 1996) was an American physicist, known for his contributions to electrical transmission theory and to the development of geometric programming and other areas within operations research.
Duffin obtained a BSc in physics at the University of Illinois, where he was elected to Sigma Xi in 1932.[1] He stayed at Illinois for his PhD, which was advised by Harold Mott-Smith and David Bourgin, producing a thesis entitled Galvanomagnetic and Thermomagnetic Phenomena (1935).[2]
Duffin lectured at Purdue University and Illinois before joining the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. during World War II.[3] His wartime work was devoted to the development of navigational equipment and mine detectors. In 1946, he became professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.[1] He wrote a letter of recommendation to Princeton University for John Forbes Nash, Jr., later a Nobel laureate. In 1949, Duffin and his student Raoul Bott developed a generalized method of synthesising networks without transformers which were required in earlier methods.[4]
In 1941, Duffin and A. C. Schaeffer put forward[5] a conjecture in metric diophantine approximation which was resolved in 2020 by James Maynard and Dimitris Koukoulopoulos.[6]
In 1967 Duffin joined with Clarence Zener and Elmor Peterson to write Geometric Programming which developed a branch of mathematical programming by introducing a generalization of polynomials to posynomials for engineering applications. Impressed with its innovations, a reviewer wrote, "common sense, ingenuity and originality in applying first principles are still competitive with other creative forms of the intellect."[7] The methods of geometric programming are sometimes adapted for convex optimization.
Duffin would remain at Carnegie Mellon until his retirement in 1988.[3] Duffin was also a consultant to Westinghouse Electric Corporation.[3]
Duffin was inducted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972[8] and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974[9] .[10] He was joint winner of the 1982 John von Neumann Theory Prize,[11] and winner of Sigma Xi's Monie A. Ferst Award for 1984 in recognition of his ability as a teacher and communicator.[1] He was elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.