Robert Gary Bland (born February 25, 1948) is an American mathematician and operations researcher, a professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University.[1] He was born in New York City.[2]
Bland did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Cornell University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969, M.S. in 1972, and a Ph.D. in 1974 under the supervision of D. R. Fulkerson.[1][3] He began his faculty career at Binghamton University, but then returned to Cornell in 1978.[1]
Bland is known as one of the inventors of oriented matroids, which he used to define Bland's rule for avoiding cycles in the simplex method for linear programming.[4][5]
