Tom Magnanti has been appointed President of the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore’s so-called “fourth university”. Tom, of course, is one of the preeminent researchers and administrators in operations research. He has written lots of influential papers and books. His book with Bradly and Hax on Applied Mathematical Programming had a huge effect [...]
I often have postings that so-and-so from the world of operations research has become a dean or a provost or even a university president. Somewhat more rarely, I can talk about an operations researcher as a baseball player. Operations Research can lead to lots of jobs.
It can even lead to becoming Prime Minister [...]
Christos Papadimitriou of UC Berkeley was the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer at the EURO Meeting yesterday (in the fuzzy picture, he is getting his award from IFORS President Elise del Rosario), and gave a very fine lecture on “Computing Equilibria” (and Sex, though that was not in the formal title). The starting point for his lecture [...]
I am in Bonn, Germany for the EURO Conference. Tons of people here (2200+) but the organizers seem to be coping very well. Last night was a nice reception in a beer garden nearby. It has been a long time since I was at a conference with unlimited free beers. This [...]
Fast Company has IBM Vice President, Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences, Brenda Dietrich as number 27 on their list of “100 Most Creative People in Business”. Nice quote from her:
“Mathematics,” says Brenda L. Dietrich, 49, “is not mechanical. You’re finding how things look different on the surface and then seeing what they have in common [...]
The ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) has announced 44 new Fellows. A number of them are well-known in the operations research community (some are just plain well-known: can it be that Stephen Cook of NP-completeness fame was not a Fellow before now?). These include:
Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie Mellon. Tuomas does an amazing number of things [...]
To me, honorary doctorates are things given to people much older than myself. For instance, my colleague Egon Balas received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liege. But Egon is a bit older than me (though I suspect he will be working long after I have shuffled off to some retirement [...]
I am just back from Cincinnati, where I gave the 17th E. Leonard Arnoff Memorial Lecture on the Practice of Management Science. When I look at the list of presenters, with my name on it, I am reminded of the Sesame Street tune “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)“. I [...]
Bill Pulleyblank, Vice President, Center for Business Optimization, IBM (I have written about CBO before) gave a talk at Georgia Tech on April 17. The title was “Computing, Business, and Operations Research: The Next Challenges”. Here is the abstract:
There have been two consistent drivers over the last sixty years of the evolution of computing: Computer [...]
My colleague Egon Balas just received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liege. Yves Crama, Director General of the School of Management, introduced Egon with a wonderful and heartfelt introduction. Some excerpts:
For more than 40 years, Egon Balas has been one of the pioneers of all major theoretical developments and of [...]
