Lemme talk about smth so niche to basically just me lol
So there's this guy who pioneered the field of convex optimization. Leonie Kachiyan. Soviet-born from Moscow, Armenian heritage. His main important contribution was the Ellipsoid Method, which is theoretically significant in that it showed that convex optimization problems with separation oracles can be approximated within an epsilon of the optimal solution in polynomial time (with log bit complexity). Moreover, if you could prove the existence of an algorithm to go from approximation to exactness in polynomial time, you can pair this with Ellipsoid Method to get optimal solutions (e.g. linear programs) (often, approximate solutions are good enough for most applications). Moreover, it's generally easiest to prove results about the Ellipsoid Method in convex optimization algorithms research, as the faster Interior Point Method demands that you have a bit more information about the problem (i.e. a closed form for the dual). Unfortunately he passed away in '05 due to a heart attack.
Now, guess who is daughter is? Anna Kachiyan, co-host of the Red Scare podcast, where the hosts started as "Bernie Bros" and took a hard right pivot 1 or 2 years ago into MAGA.
I think it's interesting that both of these people have like D-list fame for vastly different reasons. Also this is very niche bc in order to know this you gotta specifically be into optimization research and then also political podcast drama. But yeah lmao there's a little slice of my stupid baka life
