Month: November 2013

Own a Ton of Operations Research History

dantzigOr perhaps own two tons of Operations Research History (I am not sure how much 70 bankers boxes weigh)!  And not just any history:  this is the mathematics library of George B. Dantzig, available by “private treaty” (i.e.: there is a price;  if you pay it, you get the whole library) from PBA Galleries.  I suspect everyone who reads this blog knows who Dantzig was, but just in case: he is the Father of Operations Research.  His fundamental work on the simplex algorithm for linear programming and other work should have won the Economics Nobel Prize. He had a very long (spanning the 1940s practically to the end of his life in 2005) , and very influential, career.  You can read more about him in this article by Cottle, Johnson, and Wets.

At the auction site, there are also some reminiscences from his daughter Jessica Dantzig Klass.   She talks about some of the books in the library:

I found two copies of Beitraege zur Theorie der linearen Ungleichungen, Theodore S. Motzkin’s dissertation, translated “Contributions to the Theory of Linear Inequalities.” This work anticipated the development of linear programming by fourteen years and is probably the reason Motzkin is known as the “grandfather of linear programming”. A close family friend, Ted, as he was known, was a gentle, mild mannered man, with intense eyes, and a sweet smile, and he “lived” mathematics, even keeping small pieces of paper by his bed, so that when he had an idea at night he would be able to write it down. His dissertation is interesting from an historic perspective; bridging the gap between Fourier and my father’s work. Ted, a student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, was awarded his Ph.D. in 1933, but it was not published until 1936 in Jerusalem. One can trace the mathematical lineage of Motzkin’s advisor, Alexander Ostrowski, back to Gauss. And until his untimely death in 1970, Motzkin was my husband’s Ph.D. advisor at UCLA.

I don’t know how expensive the collection is (and I certainly don’t have room for 70 bankers boxes of material), but it would be great if an organization (INFORMS, are you listening) or a historically-minding researcher picked this up.  I suspect in the future, there will be far fewer libraries from great researchers.  I know that my own “library” is really nothing more than the hard drive on whatever computer I am using.

Scheduling Major League Baseball

ESPN has a new “30 for 30” short video on the scheduling of Major League Baseball.  In the video, they outline the story of Henry and Holly Stephenson who provided Major League Baseball with its schedule for twenty-five years.  They were eventually supplanted by some people with a computer program.  Those people are Doug Bureman, George Nemhauser, Kelly Easton, and me, doing business as “Sports Scheduling Group”.

It was fascinating to hear the story of the Stephensons, and a little heart-breaking to hear them finally losing a job they obviously loved.  I have never met Henry or Holly, and they have no reason to think good thoughts about me.  But I think an awful lot of them.

I began working on baseball scheduling in 1994, and it took ten years of hard work (first Doug and me, then the four of us) before MLB selected our schedule for play.

Why were we successful in 2004 and not in 1994? At the core, technology changed. The computers we used in 2004 were 1000 times faster than the 1994 computers. And the underlying optimization software was at least 1000 times faster. So technology made us at least one million times faster. And that made all the difference. Since then, computers and algorithms have made us 1000 times faster still.  And, in addition, we learned quite a bit about how to best do complicated sports scheduling problems.

Another way to see this is that in 1994, despite my doctorate and my experience and my techniques, I was 1 millionth of the scheduler that the Stephensons were. Henry and Holly Stephenson are truly scheduling savants, able to see patterns that no other human can see. But eventually technological advances overtook them.

More recently, those advances allowed us to provide the 2013 schedule with interleague play in every time slot (due to the odd number of teams in each league), something not attempted before. I am confident that we are now uniquely placed to provide such intricate schedules. But that does not take away from my admiration of the Stephensons: I am in awe of what they could do.