Happy Birthday to the Blog!

This is the blog’s third birthday!  It has been an exciting year, both personally and in the world of operations research.  Personally, at this time last year, I was in New Zealand, waiting for the weather to warm up and wanting to get back in the water.  Since then, we have returned to the US, and I have gotten back into my “normal life” as a Tepper School faculty member.

In the world of OR, this year will go down as a year full of flux in the commercial world.  ILOG is acquired by IBM (not quite yet, but things are underway); Dash is acquired by Fair-Isaac; Gurobi announces its formation.  There were some sad entries, including the passing of Rick Rosenthal, Mike Rothkopf, and Lloyd Clark, among others.   I went to some fantastic conferences, including INFORMS Washington, CPAIOR Paris, and, particularly, IFORS South Africa, a life changing experience.  Operations Research seems to show up more and more in the popular press, and is showing up in books aimed at the general public.

Just a few statistics, providing an update from last year’s birthday post.  I posted 133 times in the year (up from 83, and well past my goal of 2/week).  I’ve had 237 comments in the last year, up a lot from 69, so you too have been much more active!  I get about 3500 visitors per month (up from 2000), and, new this year, Feedburner tells me about 450 people subscribe through google reader and other rss feeds (that don’t typically hit my server).  Spam is running at about 10/day, but my system catches it, so it is no big deal.

A special thanks to the other OR people blogging (check them out in the sidebar).  I like feeling part of a community!

Reading through the past year’s postings, I am reminded strongly what a wonderful job it is to be a professor, and how lucky I am to have ended up in a field as wide and fascinating as operations research.