Marguerite Straus Frank (September 8, 1927 – December 11, 2024) was a French-American mathematician who is a pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.
After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto,[1] Frank contributed largely to the fields of transportation theory and Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her PhD thesis, New Simple Lie Algebras.
[2] She was one of the first female PhD students in mathematics at Harvard University,[3] completing her dissertation in 1956, with Abraham Adrian Albert as her advisor.
[2] Together with Philip Wolfe in 1956 at Princeton, she invented the Frank–Wolfe algorithm,[4] an iterative optimization method for general constrained non-linear problems.
He was a Professor of literature at Stanford and an author of widely acclaimed critical biography of Dostoevsky.