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Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale Obituary
Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale Obituary
BY M. J. D. POWELL,F.R.S.
INTRODUCTION
* Numbers
given in this form refer to entries in the bibliography at the end of the text.
23
M R ca-
24 Biographical Memoirs
FAMILY LIFE
imaginary country but bridge replaced this activity. Hands were discussed
on journeys to Cornwall, and he devised a new bidding system for the
family, the usual four being Martin, Julian, Mrs Beale and her mother.
Both Martin and Julian played for Cambridge against Oxford, and Julian
went on to play for England in international matches. Having heard that
Martin would work in his group at the Admiralty Research Laboratory,
S. Vajda visited him at Cambridge, but apparently he showed more
interest in a book he had begun to write on bidding systems (which was
not published) than in his future employment. Martin did, however, join
the mathematics group of the A.R.L. from Cambridge, having gained
a first-class honours degree in mathematics in 1949 and a distinction in
the statistics diploma in 1950.
He spent the university vacations at home in Stanwell Moor or
Treyarnon Bay, and continued to live with his parents when he joined the
A.R.L., moving from Stanwell Moor to Whitehall, Wraysbury (also in
Middlesex) in 1952. On 1 July 1953 he married Violette Elizabeth Anne
Lewis (Betty) at St Mary's Church, Hampton. They had met in time to
celebrate his 22nd birthday together for she was a scientific assistant in
the A.R.L. Mathematics Group. This celebration was because she had
been sad to hear that Martin had spent his 21st birthday playing bridge,
but he soon encouraged her to play too. An early example of his concern
for teaching others occurred on a train from Waterloo when Betty sought
refuge in a 'ladies only' compartment as she did not wish to receive
instruction, but Martin, from the corridor, was determined to enlighten
her on the lead to defeat a contract that had occurred earlier in the
evening. She soon became part of the Beale family, visiting Windhover
several times before their marriage, and enjoying cycling, walking and
bridge with Martin. They became firm friends and dependent on each
other for the rest of his life.
Their first home was a small terrace house at Strawberry Hill,
Twickenham, within cycling distance of A.R.L., where Betty continued
working until a few weeks before the birth of their elder son, Nicholas,
in February 1955. Their daughter, Rachel, was born in May 1957. The
family spent 1958 in the U.S.A. (at Princeton except for a six-week
summer visit to Los Angeles), which not only helped Martin's career
but also provided initial contacts with several Americans who became
intimate friends of the family, including George Dantzig and Philip
Wolfe. On returning to England they were able to afford a car. Their
younger son, Marcus, was born in August 1960. In 1963 they moved to
Ember Lane, Esher, Surrey, from 3 bedrooms to 5, Betty having found
the house as Martin was so immersed in his work.
At their new home Martin would work on the sitting room floor, and
even there he enjoyed the company of his children provided they did not
disturb his papers. Many visitors came to Ember Lane, and E. Hellerman
(Dantzig & Tomlin 1987) writes: 'One evening, I think it was in 1967, my
26 Biographical Memoirs
wife and I were guests at the Beale home in Esher. After a fine dinner and
stimulating conversation, Martin, knowing that I had a background in
music, decided that he and his family would sing a Gilbert and Sullivan
operetta. Each member of the family was assigned one or more roles to
sing, and then to the music of a recording the performance ensued.
Needless to say, I had never heard a rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan
with more spirit and gusto. Martin's enthusiasm for the music spilled
over into the family.' This enthusiasm included composing 'Ping went
the bell' for the family and piano playing, especially the music of Haydn.
Later Rachel studied music at the Dartington College of Arts, and
Nicholas and Marcus too became stronger musicians than Martin.
Remarkably, Nicholas and Marcus also obtained scholarships from
St Aubyn's to Winchester, and then went up to Trinity College, Cambridge,
where they read mathematics and architecture respectively.
On Sundays the family regularly attended church at Weston Green,
near Esher, and then spent the rest of the day at Whitehall. There they
thoroughly enjoyed the creations of Martin's father, including a go-cart
and 'H.M.S. Octagon', which was a mock submarine conning-tower in
the garden that included an escape slide and telephone communication
with the house, but Martin did not inherit any engineering skills. They
swam in the swimming pool there, even on Christmas Day. Every
summer they visited Windhover, and there are photographs of massive
systems of sandcastles that the family constructed at Treyarnon Bay.
After Martin's appointment at Imperial College, Rachel, when writing
home from school, addressed her letters to 'Professor and Mrs Beale',
but the school office had been advised to write to 'Mr and Mrs Beale'.
When questioned on this anomaly, Rachel explained that her father was
a professor only on Mondays. From then on the family adopted this
distinction gleefully, and Betty recalls: 'When he became an F.R.S.
everyone was being announced as they greeted the President at a Con-
versazione:- " Lord and Lady X", "His Excellency the Ambassador for
Y", "Professor and Mrs Z",...; Martin gave our name as "Mr and Mrs
Martin Beale". I said later "You might have said Professor on this
occasion". "Why? " he replied simply, " It isn't a Monday".'
His father died in 1972 and for a few years his mother continued to run
both Whitehall and Windhover House, where she was visited regularly
by her descendents. She then decided to retain only Whitehall, but
Martin's attachment to Cornwall was so strong that he sold the house at
Ember Lane in 1977 to buy Windhover. Because he needed a base near
London too, Martin and his family also resided in a part of Whitehall.
In a typical week he would drive to Treyarnon Bay after work on the
Friday and return to Whitehall on the Sunday afternoon, much refreshed
by the weekend in Cornwall. Of course he was allowed leave from his
activities at Scicon, but his holidays were seldom more than two weeks
long. The 1978 holiday was tragic: his brother, Julian, during one of his
frequent visits to Treyarnon Bay, fell to his death in a cliff accident.
Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale 27
entirely characteristically took his duties extremely seriously and over the
years lectured regularly to final year undergraduate students of mathematics
on optimization and operational research and to M.Sc. students of statistics
on numerical optimization. In addition and very importantly he supervised
a succession of doctoral students, 10 over the period in question. In the initial
period I think students found his lectures difficult, particularly because
Martin's style was not suited to the habits of British undergraduates who
tend to work not so much from textbooks as from lecturers' notes which are
expected to be given in a form lending themselves to coherent note-taking.
An anecdote from those early years in many ways characteristic of the man
is told by an ex-colleague who attended one of Martin's courses. One of the
students was rather noticeably asleep. Martin at first made no comment, but
towards the end of the period said to my colleague "Please wake Mr X. He
will find this next bit interesting ". I feel sure this was said out of real concern
and was not to be taken sarcastically.
His approach to teaching at postgraduate level is recalled by E. M.
Aghedo, who was one of Martin's research students:
He was more of a father than a supervisor to me. He had the outlook of
the legendary Chinese Martial Arts Teacher who would punch hard to make
the pupil learn to punch and praise when he had learned. Martin Beale had
the magic of making the most difficult of subjects a child's play. I was taught
to be critical of any result by not being deceived by its beauty but being
careful to explore fully its usefulness. He usually set me on a job like so:
"Investigate the correctness of this concept. If correct, why, and if not, why
not." Such was the man Martin! He was a very thorough man who believed
in a high standard of work and was very uncompromising about this.
Of course he also gave much encouragement and guidance to young
researchers at Scicon, as shown in a tribute from R. M. Hattersley:
'Martin taught me, with patience and kindness, most of what I know
about mathematical programming. He promoted in me a lasting interest
in the field, and for that I am in his debt, as no doubt are many others
before me.'
The research of very many people was helped by his participation in
conferences. His invited lectures were always useful but not always easy
to follow, because in a single talk he would often give details of many
different subjects. They were thoroughly enjoyable, however, as Martin
excelled at conveying his enthusiasm, and he would not expose a topic
unless he believed that it was valuable. The contents of these lectures are
considered later in this memoir. When listening to papers he sat near
the front of the audience, he was always attentive, and usually he asked
questions. He tried much harder than most people to understand all that
was said, and frequently he sought further information from speakers
after their presentations. These discussions were often of more help to the
speakers than to Martin, but his thirst for knowledge of mathematical
programming algorithms that might be useful was unquenchable. At
conferences he hardly ever missed an opportunity to listen to a relevant
paper and he did not skip talks that were given by unknown researchers.
32 Biographical Memoirs
PUBLISHED WORK
The work on special ordered sets, for example, shows that much effort
is needed to include in a mathematical programming system the ability to
gain efficiency from the structure of an optimization calculation. There-
fore, because most problems are now solved by general systems, it is
usual to ignore structure unless there are already features in a system that
can take advantage of it. However, in the days when new programs were
written for new calculations and when computers were much slower,
more attention was given to special structures. In particular Martin
studied the 'purchase-storage problem' with G. Morton (1958): here one
can buy commodities at a seasonal price, there is a known market for them
in a sequence of time periods, and they can be stored for later selling but
there are capacity constraints on the warehouses. It is shown that the
optimal profit up to the end of a time period can be calculated easily from
the optimal strategy up to the end of the previous time period, and that
some parametric programming can be included too, parametric pro-
gramming being the study of the effect on the solution of changes to
the coefficients of the calculation. In reference 1959a he extends the
'transportation problem' to the case when each variable in the objective
function is replaced by a convex function of the variable, but the
proposed algorithm seems not to have been very successful. In reference
1963 a he addresses the important case when a few variables of a linear
programming calculation occur in many constraints, but otherwise the
problem can be partitioned into several small disjoint problems; it
describes a primal algorithm that takes advantage of this structure.
Another variation of the transportation problem is considered (1963 b):
here there are so many sources and destinations that it is impracticable
to store every source-destination distance, so instead one works with
distances between relatively few key towns and from sources and
destinations to their neighbouring key towns. He notes (1980e) that the
special ordered set technique can be applied to a zero-one variables
problem whose objective function is the ratio of two linear terms
(fractional programming). After 1963, however, most of his work on
structured calculations became more general, and it provided valuable
contributions to the following mathematical programming systems.
Reference 1965c (coauthor R. E. Small) describes the method for
integer programming that is incorporated in the C.E.I.R. LP/90/94
system. This system also solves 'decomposable' linear programming
problems efficiently (1965d, coauthors P. A. B. Hughes & R. E. Small),
where 'decomposable' means that, except for a few constraints that are
treated specially, the problem can be separated into several small
independent subproblems, so the situation is similar to the one that was
studied in 1963 (1963a). Several other features of LP/90/94 are
mentioned (1968). Then the UMPIRE system was developed at Scicon
(1970c); this work included an independent discovery of the use of
product forms and triangular decompositions of sparse basis matrices in
38 Biographical Memoirs
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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