Andrew Vázsonyi

Andrew Vázsonyi (1916–2003), also known as Endre Weiszfeld and Zepartzatt Gozinto) was a mathematician and operations researcher. He is known for Weiszfeld's algorithm for minimizing the sum of distances to a set of points, and for founding The Institute of Management Sciences.

Endre Weiszfeld was born on November 4, 1916, the middle son of a Jewish family in Budapest, where his father was the owner of a shoe store. At age 14, he met and befriended Paul Erdős (his elder by three years), and at age 16, he began working on the geometric median problem for which he would later publish a solution. He studied at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, from which he earned a doctorate in 1936. His thesis, on higher-dimensional surfaces, was supervised by Lipót Fejér. Because of increasing discrimination against Jews in the 1930s and following the lead of his cousin, politician Vilmos Vázsonyi, he changed his name in 1937 to Andrew Vázsonyi. The name comes from that of his father's native town, Nagyvázsony. During this period, Vázsonyi studied graph theory, working with Erdős on finding necessary and sufficient conditions for an infinite graph to have an Euler tour.

In 1938, Vázsonyi was invited by Otto Szász to escape Europe and work with Szász at the University of Cincinnati, but was only able to obtain a one-year student visa. Instead, he traveled to Paris, and finally succeeded in traveling to the US in April 1940, two months before France's fall to the Nazis. He spent a year at a Quaker workshop at Haverford, Pennsylvania, and in 1941 began graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Harvard University, studying there under Richard von Mises with the support of a Gordon McKay Fellowship. He earned an M.S. in 1942 and continued to work at Harvard for Howard Wilson Emmons, studying the design of supersonic aircraft. While at Harvard, he met and married Baroness Laura Vladimirovna Saparova, a musician and immigrant from Georgia whom he had met at Harvard's International Club.

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