Leonid Khachiyan, 52, a Rutgers University professor and a noted expert in computer science whose work helped computers process extremely complex problems, died Friday of a heart attack at his home in South Brunswick, N.J.
In 1979, Khachiyan found an efficient way to solve programming problems that were thought to be intractable because they dealt with an often astronomically large number of options. His breakthrough dealt with the underlying mathematics to find the best of a finite but huge number of choices a computer can pursue.
