In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, “Muggles” are people who have no magical ability, and, indeed, no knowledge of the magical world. The term “Muggle” is not exactly a compliment, and veers towards a pejorative. From the first book: Hagrid: “I’d like ter see a great Muggle like you stop him,” Harry: “A what?” Hagrid: […]
I am a big fan of “challenges” in operations research. Almost twenty years ago, I ran a DIMACS Challenge on finding cliques, coloring graphs and solving satisfiability problems. That challenge gave a clear picture of where we were then in those areas and showed the variety of approaches possible for those three problems. I also […]
If you are an undergraduate student who has done great operations research, or know someone like that, note that INFORMS has a prize for great undergraduate work. The work can be in OR theory or practice, but the judging is based on a paper. You can find out more information at the INFORMS website. Better […]
Yesterday I was messing around with The Mathematics Genealogy Project and I learned that Anna Nagurney, among others, is a not-so-distant cousin. That inspired me to shoot off a couple of emails trying to trace my history farther back. To recap, my advisors were Don Ratliff and John Bartholdi. John was a student of Don, […]
My father has spent time over the last decade collecting pictures and documents related to our family tree. I greatly appreciate him doing this, and the result is fascinating. There is no one really famous in my tree, unless you are a follower of (Canadian) prairie socialism, since I think J.S. Woodsworth is in there, […]