Egon Balas, a pioneer in integer and disjunctive programming, died on March 18, 2019. He was 96. His life included two imprisonments for joining the communist party to oppose the Nazis during World War II. He later became one of the world’s foremost experts in mathematical optimization after joining Carnegie Mellon in 1967. “A beloved member of the CMU faculty for more than half a century, Egon Balas was a preeminent and legendary scholar who was enormously influential in the fields of operations research and applied mathematics“. In 2016 he gave this amazing interview.