He was the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and did fundamental work in developing integer and disjunctive programming.

[2] Balas was born in Cluj (Romania) in a Hungarian Jewish family.

He was married to art historian Edith Balas, a survivor of Auschwitz, with whom he had two daughters.

[5] He left Romania in 1966 and accepted an appointment with Carnegie Mellon University in 1967.

[6] His mathematics PhD thesis was titled Minimax et dualité en programmation discrète and was written under the direction of Robert Fortet.