Leonid Khachiyan, a Russian-born mathematician who helped to advance the field of linear programming, which is used by computer scientists to schedule complex rosters of airline flights and to solve problems in finance and industry, died on April 29 at his home in South Brunswick, N.J. He was 52.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

Computer scientists and mathematicians say his work helped revolutionize his field.

Dr. Khachiyan (pronounced KA-tchee-an), who began his career at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, had been a professor of computer science at Rutgers since 1992.

In 1979, while a researcher at the academy, Dr. Khachiyan published a paper in a Russian mathematics journal that helped to demonstrate that certain problems in linear programming could be solved practically and in a reasonable amount of computing time. Computer scientists had previously relied on a method using the simplex algorithm to review and order vast stores of information.