Jack R. Edmonds (born April 5, 1934) is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize. Early career Edmonds attended Duke University before completing his undergraduate degree at George Washington University in 1957. He thereafter received a master's degree in 1960 at the University of Maryland under Bruce L. Reinhart with a thesis on the problem of embedding graphs into surfaces. From 1959 to 1969 he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then the National Bureau of Standards), and was a founding member of Alan Goldman’s newly created Operations Research Section in 1961. Goldman proved to be a crucial influence by enabling Edmonds to work in a RAND Corporation-sponsored workshop in Santa Monica, California. It is here that Edmonds first presented his findings on defining a class of algorithms that could run more efficiently. Most combinatorics scholars, during this time, were not focused on algorithms. However Edmonds was drawn to them and these initial investigations were key developments for his later work between matroids and optimization. He spent the years from 1961 to 1965 on the subject of NP versus P and in 1966 originated the conjectures NP ≠ P and NP ∩ coNP = P. Research Edmonds's 1965 paper “Paths, Trees and Flowers” was a preeminent paper in initially suggesting the possibility of establishing a mathematical theory of efficient combinatorial algorithms. One of his earliest and notable contributions is the blossom algorithm for constructing maximum matchings on graphs, discovered in 1961 and published in 1965. This was the first polynomial-time algorithm for maximum matching in graphs. Its generalization to weighted graphs was a conceptual breakthrough in the use of linear programming ideas in combinatorial optimization. It sealed in the importance of there being proofs, or "witnesses", that the answer for an instance is yes and there being proofs, or "witnesses", that the answer for an instance is no. In this blossom algorithm paper, Edmonds also characterizes feasible problems as those solvable in polynomial time; this is one of the origins of the Cobham–Edmonds thesis. A breakthrough of the Cobham–Edmonds thesis, was defining the concept of polynomial time characterising the difference between a practical