Lester R. Ford, Jr.

Lester Randolph Ford Jr. (born September 23, 1927 – February 26, 2017) was an American mathematician specializing in network flow problems. He was the son of mathematician Lester R. Ford Sr.

Ford's paper with D. R. Fulkerson on the maximum flow problem and the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm for solving it, published as a technical report in 1954 and in a journal in 1956, established the max-flow min-cut theorem. Ford also developed the Bellman–Ford algorithm for finding shortest paths in graphs that have negatively weighted edges before Bellman.