NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Leonid Khachiyan, a renowned professor of --> -- computer science at Rutgers University whose work helped computers --> -- process large problems, died of a heart attack Friday. He was 52.
In 1979, Khachiyan proved the existence of an efficient way to solve programming problems that were thought to be intractable because they dealt with an often astronomically large number of options. His breakthrough dealt with the underlying mathematics to find the best of a finite but huge number of choices a computer can pursue.
In 1982, he won the Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society.
Born in 1952 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Khachiyan came to the U.S. in 1989. He taught at Cornell University before joining Rutgers in 1990. -- ASSOCIATED PRESS