Subject to: Vašek Chvátal

Vašek Chvátal was born in Prague and received his undergraduate degree in mathematics in the same city. He left Czechoslovakia in August 1968, three days after its Soviet-led invasion. Having earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in the fall of 1970, he taught mathematics, computer science, and operations research at McGill, Stanford, Université de Montréal, and Rutgers. From 2004 till his retirement in 2014, he held a Canada Research Chair, first in Combinatorial Optimization and then in Discrete Mathematics, at Concordia University in Montreal. His research agenda has ranged from graph theory and combinatorics to linear programming and cutting planes to analysis of algorithms to the traveling salesman problem. In 2015, he shared the John von Neumann Theory Prize 'for seminal and profound contributions to the theoretical foundations of optimization' with Jean Bernard Lasserre. His most recent book, "The Discrete Mathematical Charms of Paul Erdős", was published last August by Cambridge University Press.

Contents of this video:
0:00 - Intro
1:58 - Václav vs. Vašek
2:20 - Roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour
3:24 - Choosing between Mathematics, Chemistry and Film School
5:20 - First paper at the age of 19
7:25 - First meeting with Paul Erdős
10:14 - Leaving Prague soon after the Russian invasion + Period in Vienna
14:12 - Moving to Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
14:45 - Moving to Waterloo and meeting Crispin Nash-Williams and Jack Edmonds...
17:07 - ...With little help from a friend
18:44 - Prize-winning short story "Déjà Vu"
20:26 - On being part of the hippie movement
21:35 - Sgt. Pepper
22:52 - "Creature" from Stanford
24:43 - On being arrested at the Mexican border and going to "Yale"
28:12 - First paper with Paul Erdős
30:00 - Marijuana vs. Ritalin: a dinner with Paul Erdős
32:27 - Receiving a hand from Donald Knuth
34:25 - George Dantzig stories
41:15 - Carol Doda, Channel 36 and Linear Programming
43:35 - Comb Inequalities
46:07 - Chvátal-Gomory cuts
49:35 - A "harmful" way of looking at combinatorial optimization problems
54:05 - Writing the famous Linear Programming book
59:48 - Reacting to the breakthrough result on Linear Programming by Leonid Khachiyan
1:02:15 - Claude Berge, Crazy Horse Saloon and Polly Underground
1:04:50 - László Lovász story
1:09:42 - TSP saga
1:19:11 - Meeting Marketa and marrying her after 4 weeks!
1:19:29 - Greedy decisions vs. strong branching
1:20:05 - Retirement and moving back to Prague
1:22:04 - New book