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 [...]
New post on the INFORMS Blog on a panel discussion I attended on how to teach modeling:
I just attended a nice “panel discussion” on Teaching the Art of Modeling, put together by Jim Orlin (MIT), Stephen Powell and Rob Shumsky (both from Dartmouth). This was not your normal INFORMS session! The panelists decided to do [...]
No, I am not going back to get a bachelor’s degree (actually, only my graduate degrees are in industrial engineering: my bachelor’s is in math and computer science, so maybe I should go back!). The son of a colleague of mine is planning to take engineering and wonders where to go.
In my mind, one of [...]
Stacy Blackman, in the blog “Back to B-School”, has a short summary of the ideas of Matthew Stewart, author of The Management Myth, a book highly critical of of the world of MBA education. Since I primarily teach operations research in the Tepper MBA program, I was heartened by Stewart’s views:
While Stewart believes that [...]
Noah Snyder, a doctoral student in mathematics at Berkeley, has a wonderful post on how to be a successful doctoral student (I lost track on where I saw this: if it is from an OR blog, please let me know so I can give credit Thanks to Yiorgos Adamopoulos for his tweet on this). While [...]
The New York Times has an article on “Reaching an Autistic Teenager” describing an approach for teaching autistic kids, who generally are extremely self-absorbed and difficult to reach. The approach, where teachers and students alike work out how the day will go, with students learning to learn and to interact, sounds fantastic: I [...]
Florida International University is planning to shut down 17 degree programs, including industrial and systems engineering. I have good feelings for FIU, since my first doctoral graduate took a position there (in the business school; he has long since moved on), but it is shocking that a popular and important degree such as [...]
Since today was
The first working day after classes ended last week, and
Warm and sunny in Pittsburgh,
I went to work in shorts and sandals. In honor of this, I would like to direct your attention to an article in Inside Higher Ed by Erik M. Jensen entitled “A Call for Professional Attire“. In [...]
Serendipity works, by definition, in amazing ways. Because I went to New Zealand, I rented a house on Waiheke Island, which is now being considered by another professor for his sabbatical next year, who emailed me. And his email led to my visiting his home page, and clicking on a pointer or two, [...]
Last year, I received a paper from Prof. Henk Tijms of the Vrije University Amsterdam on using stochastic dynamic programming to analyze some simple dice games (pdf version available). A few years ago, I tried to do something similar with an analysis of a game I called Flip, but which is more commonly known [...]
