Stephen Baker, a senior writer at Business Week, is part of the group that was not offered a job after that magazine was bought by Bloomberg. Steve’s journalism has been a tremendous boon to the world of operations research. His cover story “Math will Rock Your World” pointed out all the ways mathematics [...]
In many applications, it can be difficult to measure the effect of an operations research project. For instance, my colleagues and I provide schedules for Major League Baseball. What is the value added by the operations research we do? MLB doesn’t have the time, energy or money to handle multiple schedulers in parallel: they decided [...]
The New York Times has a nice article on the recent Communications of the ACM article on P=NP (article at author Lance Fortnow’s site). I had read Fortnow’s article last month, and really liked it. In fact, I am surprised I didn’t blog it: I guess I was too busy worrying about [...]
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 [...]
As I have mentioned a number of times, I teach data mining to the MBA students here at the Tepper School. It is a popular course, with something like 60% of our students taking it before graduating. I offer an operations research view of data mining: here are the algorithms, here are the assumptions, here [...]
A Guardian (London) article has the provocative title “Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators” (thanks Hamish for the pointer). They report on how bacteria can be used to search through feasible solutions to the traveling salesman problem to find optimal solutions:
The research, published today in the Journal of Biological Engineering, proves that bacteria [...]
Pittsburgh is becoming the center of the universe when it comes to combining baseball with operations research. First, there is … well, me! … a Professor of Operations Research whose company provides Major League Baseball with their player and umpire schedules. And, beginning last year, Pittsburgh has had Ross Ohlendorf, who has converted his Princeton [...]
Laura McLay, author of Punk Rock Operations Research, has an interesting research paper out on identifying risky airline passengers in order to increase security for them. It is costly (both in money and in passenger inconvenience) to subject everyone to the highest level of screening. So who should be screened, given limited screening [...]
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 New York Times Magazine this week is a special issue on debt (a topic that has a particular resonance to me: we are still paying off an expensive, but spectacular, year in New Zealand!). There is a fascinating article on what credit card companies can learn about you based on your spending. For instance,
A [...]
