Alexander Rinnooy Kan

Alexander Hendrik George Rinnooy Kan (born 5 October 1949) is a Dutch mathematician and business leader. As of September 2012 he is University Professor of Economics and Business Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant named him the most influential person in the Netherlands in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Since 9 June 2015, he has been a member of the Senate on behalf of Democrats 66 (D66).

Biography

Rinnooy Kan grew up in The Hague. He graduated in mathematics at Leiden University in 1972. In the same year, he obtained his B.Sc. degree in econometrics from the University of Amsterdam. In 1972–73, he worked as a mathematician at Spectrum Encyclopedia. From 1973 until 1977, he was a scientific employee in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Delft University of Technology (then called the Delft Technical College). In 1976, he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Amsterdam; he was advised by Gijsbert de Leve.

In 1977, he went to the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he became a full professor in Operations Research in 1980 at the age of 30. In 1983, he was appointed head of the Econometric Institute, and in 1986 rector magnificus of the university. In the meantime, he was visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and MIT, amongst others.

From 1991 until 1996, he was president of the employers federation VNO and, after the merger with NCW, of the VNO-NCW. Between 1996 and 2006, Rinnooy Kan was a member of the board of directors of ING Group, where he was responsible for the Asian branch. He was a member of the Netherlands Innovation Platform until the platform was dissolved in 2010. From August 2006 until September 2012, he was president and crown-appointed member of the Dutch Social-Economic Council (SER). He was succeeded in this position by Wiebe Draijer. During his farewell party at SER he was appointed Commander in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

Publications

Books

• 1985 The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Guided Tour of Combinatorial Optimization. With Eugene L. Lawler, Jan Karel Lenstra, and David B. Shmoys. John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.
• 1993, Logistics of Production and Inventory. Vol. 4. with Stephen C. Graves, and Paul Herbert Zipkin, eds.

Selected articles

• Byrd, R. H., Dert, C. L., Kan, A. H. R., & Schnabel, R. B. (1990). "Concurrent Stochastic Methods for Global Optimization". Mathematical Programming, 46(1-3), 1-29.
• Lenstra, A. K., A. H. G. Rinnooy Kan, and Alexander Schrijver. "History of Mathematical Programming: A Collection of Personal Reminiscences." (1991).
• Bastian, Cock, and Alexander HG Rinnooy Kan. "The Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem Revisited." European Journal of Operational Research 56.3 (1992): 407-412.
• Flippo, O. E., & Kan, A. H. G. (1993). "Decomposition in General Mathematical Programming". Mathematical Programming, 60(1-3), 361-382.
• Lawler, Eugene L., J. K. Lenstra, AHG Rinnooy Kan, and D.B. Shmoys . "Sequencing and Scheduling: Algorithms and Complexity." Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science 4 (1993): 445-522.