Alison Harcourt

Harcourt was born Alison Doig in Colac, Victoria, in 1929. Her father was Keith Doig, a physician and Australian rules footballer who received the Military Cross during World War I. Her mother, Louie Grant, was of Scottish descent and was sister to physicist Sir Kerr Grant. She was schooled at Colac West State School, Colac High School and Fintona Girls' School. After her schooling, she enrolled at the University of Melbourne, gaining a Bachelor of Arts with a major in mathematics, and then a Bachelor of Science majoring in physics. While specialising in statistics undertaking a Master of Arts degree, she developed a technique for integer linear programming. ==London School of Economics==

On the basis of her work in linear programming, she started work at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the late 1950s. In 1960, Doig and fellow LSE mathematician Ailsa Land, published a landmark paper in the economics journal Econometrica ("An Automatic Method for Solving Discrete Programming Problems"), which outlined a branch and bound optimisation algorithm for solving NP-hard problems. The algorithm is the backbone idea behind all modern Integer programming solvers such as Gurobi, Cplex. ==University of Melbourne==

In 1963, Doig returned to Melbourne, where she took up a position as a senior lecturer in statistics at the University of Melbourne. and "Wavefunctions for 4-electron 3-centre bonding"—with her husband, the chemist Richard Harcourt. Harcourt and Clark published a paper about their analysis and recommendations for the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics in 1991. Harcourt retired as an academic from the University of Melbourne in 1994, but continued to work there as a sessional tutor in statistics. She pointed out in an interview that she had "tutored or lectured in every decade from the 1940s to the 2010s". In early December 2018, the University of Melbourne awarded Harcourt with an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In June 2019, Harcourt was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in recognition of her "distinguished service to mathematics and computer science through pioneering research and development of integer linear programming". ==References==