Philip Starr "Phil" Wolfe (August 11, 1927 – December 29, 2016) was an American mathematician and one of the founders of convex optimization theory and mathematical programming.
[1] In 1954, he was offered an instructorship at Princeton, where he worked on generalizations of linear programming, such as quadratic programming and general non-linear programming, leading to the Frank–Wolfe algorithm[3] in joint work with Marguerite Frank, then a visitor at Princeton.
[4] Wolfe joined RAND corporation in 1957, where he worked with George Dantzig, resulting in the now well known Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition method.
[5] In 1965, he moved to IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
He received the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1992, jointly with Alan Hoffman.