Michel Balinski, a major figure in bringing operations-research methodology to bear on the electoral process, died Feb. 4, 2019, in France. He was 85.
Born in 1933, Balinski and his family fled France and the emerging Nazi threat and reached the United States in 1940. He graduated from Williams College in 1954 and in 1956 earned a master’s degree from MIT. In 1959 he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton. He spent the next five years at Princeton, with the consulting firm Mathematica, and at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1965 Balinski was appointed a professor of mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Then he relocated to Yale for several years before taking a professorship at the École Polytechnique in Paris. From 1983 to 1990 he was concurrently a professor of applied mathematics at Stony Brook University, SUNY.
For all his contributions to operations research, he is best known for his research and publications in electoral systems. Among his honors, Balinski twice won awards from the Mathematical Association of America for articles on voting. In 2013 he received INFORM’S John von Neumann Theory Prize, one of the highest honors in operations research.
Balinski is survived by two daughters (including Maria ’82) and a granddaughter.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.