Avriel Mordecai

1. 1933–2018

Eulogy given at the meeting of the Technion Senate on December 30, 2018:

Prof. Avriel, who was called Motke by everyone, was born in 1933 in Budapest, Hungary. His mother was a pianist and his father was a banker, and he was an only child. As a child he received from his home a love of music in general and opera in particular.

He spent the war in Budapest together with his mother and grandmother; his father was killed during the war. In 1949, when he was 16 years old, he immigrated to Israel with a Youth Aliyah group of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement on the ship Independence. The group stayed for two years at Kibbutz Kfar Menachem, where he learned Hebrew and manual labor in agriculture.

At the age of 18, he enlisted in the Nahal brigade and together with his Hungarian comrades in the group founded Kibbutz Lahav in the south (1952). A group of Israelis from the Krayot also arrived at this kibbutz – among them a young girl named Chava who became his life partner. In the kibbutz Motke was the field crops coordinator.

In 1957 Motke and Chava left the kibbutz for their studies at the Technion. First Motke completed the matriculation diplomas he lacked and did so within a year. In 1958, he began studying in the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and at the end of the first year of studies Motke and Chava married. Motke completed his B.Sc. in a short time and immediately continued to his Master’s degree, which he completed in 1963. His Master’s thesis under the supervision of Prof. David Hasson dealt with the topic of scale deposition in heat exchangers.

In the years 1963–1966, Motke studied for a Ph.D. at Stanford University. Under the supervision of Prof. Douglass Wilde, he began experiments to determine the optimum of a unimodal function with one variable using a parallel method. This was the first milestone in an amazing journey of optimization or as some would call it applied mathematics that led Motke to very different realms with the thread connecting them being operations research. During his PhD, he had the privilege of working with some of the giants of the generation of operations research in those years, including Ralph Gomory (one of the fathers of integer programming), Richard Duffin and Clarence Zener (breakthroughs in nonlinear programming) and, above all, George Dantzig – the founding father of linear programming. Motke’s doctoral thesis gradually moved towards geometric programming – a type of convex nonlinear programming characterized by an objective function and constraints that are posynomials. As early as 1965, he used these tools for optimal design of evaporators in seawater desalination facilities for Bechtel in California.

After completing his doctorate in 1966, Motke received an offer to join the Faculty of Chemical Engineering in the Technion, but he preferred to remain longer in the USA and in 1967–1968 he did a post-doctorate in a mathematical economics research group led by the mathematician Williams at the Mobile company in Trenton, New Jersey. He and his team members led research on the zeolite catalyst that increased the yield of gasoline from crude oil by 40%. At the same time, he wrote five articles that were a direct continuation of his doctoral thesis.

In 1968 Motke returned to Israel and joined the Faculty of Chemical Engineering where he remained until 1974, when he moved to the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management. During those years he taught optimization courses at the Technion and at the same time taught at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Statistics and the School of Business Administration. Between teaching and writing articles he also found time to write a book on nonlinear programming. Published in 1976, it was the first textbook on this subject that included both theory and algorithms and it therefore immediately gained international recognition and circulation. Later, when I went to the University of Texas in Austin for doctoral studies in 1982, a Chinese classmate showed me Motke’s book translated into Chinese. I wrote to Motke, who was my teacher in the basic course on operations research in the faculty, and instead of being angry that the Chinese had translated and distributed his book without permission and without royalties, he asked me to offer the student to replace the original Chinese book with an English one that he sent me, which I did, and since then the Chinese copy has been on display in Motke’s office at the Technion.

In 1974–75, Motke was on sabbatical at Columbia University and from there he continued to another year at Stanford, where he was invited by George Dantzig. This was in the middle of the global energy crisis and Dantzig asked Motke to join a research team that was trying to understand the interrelationships between energy and the national economy with the help of mathematical models. When he returned to Israel, Motke headed an interdisciplinary team that worked within the framework of the Neaman Institute to develop the OMER model, which was the first attempt to build an energy policy on a scientific basis in Israel. A short time later he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management and held the position in 1978–79. A few years later, he was appointed the holder of the Tulin Chair, which he held until his retirement from the Technion in 1999.

In the years 1983–86, Motke was President of the Operations Research Society of Israel and later went on sabbatical as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Berkeley University and UCLA – in all of them he researched with colleagues and taught various optimization courses. Towards the end of 1987 there was an important turning point in his career path and he became interested in what is now called financial engineering (in those days it was called mathematical economics). He began advising the large investment company Goldman Sachs and the Bank of America on the optimal allocation of mortgage-backed bonds to the bank’s clients. This was and remains a complicated combinatorial problem and Motke was among the first to develop a model and write the software to run it, whereas until then they had solved the problem manually. He continued to develop models for the liquidity management of small regional banks in the USA, optimal collection of deposits for credit management and more.

Motke continued to be an active member of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management until 1999. Over the years, he supervised a number of Master’s and doctoral students, wrote several books and many articles. Among other things, he and his students were involved in developing models for planning the loading of containers for ships sailing between a large number of ports: a particularly difficult combinatorial problem whose solution has saved the Zim company many millions of dollars since it was first implemented. In 1996, I had the pleasure of editing together with Motke a textbook called Mathematical Programming for Industrial Engineers, which consolidated the knowledge in the field up to that time and made it accessible to students in industrial engineering departments around the world. In 2005 Motke received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Operations Research Society of Israel and in 2006 he was awarded the status of a Fellow of the Operations Research Society of America.

In 1995, at the same time as his work at the Faculty, Motke began working at Bank Hapoalim where he founded the Analytical Development Department which was established to provide analytical support for the bank’s financial activities. Under Motke’s leadership, mathematical models were developed and maintained, new financial products were created and analyzed, and decision support tools were built in various areas such as derivative pricing, investment portfolio management, mortgage securitization, and more. He continued to lead the Analytical Department until his retirement in 2010.

Motke’s academic career includes a large number of characteristics that have become, over the years, well-known hallmarks of the Technion. In developing the OMER model, he was one of the first to establish and lead a multidisciplinary research team, long before we adopted the policy of developing multidisciplinary research centers at the Technion; the research ties that he built with colleagues at Stanford, Columbia and other universities long before we adopted a policy of developing established institutional partnerships with leading universities abroad; his ability to promote basic research leading to scientific breakthroughs and at the same time to engage in the application of models in different environmental conditions are an example of the Technion motto of combining basic and applied research; the research he did for giant multinational companies in the fields of energy was long before the Technion acted institutionally to build lasting relationships with such companies as we practice today; and more. He was an outstanding academic leader who served as an example to generations of students and researchers who followed him.

Motke passed away on May 28, 2018. He was survived by his wife Chava, his children Dorit, Ron and Tal, their spouses, and his grandsons and granddaughters. May his memory be blessed.

Written by Prof. Boaz Golani who spoke in memory of Prof. Avriel at the Technion Senate meeting on December 30, 2018.