At the recent International Federation of Operational Research Society (IFORS) meeting in Barcelona (a fabulous conference, by the way), I had the honor of being nominated as President of that “society of societies”. If elected, my term will start January 1, 2016, so I get a bit of a head start in planning.
I was looking through one of the IFORS publications, International Ab
stracts in Operations Research. I am sure I will write about this more, since I think this is a very nice publication looking for its purpose in the age of Google. This journal publishes the abstracts of any paper in operations research, including papers published in non-OR journals. In doing so, it can be more useful than Google, since there is no need to either limit keywords (“Sports AND Operations Research”) or sift through tons of irrelevant links.
I was scanning through the subject categories of the recent issue of IAOR to find papers published in “sports”. I saw something really quite impressive. Can you see what caught my eye?
Sheep! There are five papers about operations research and sheep. They come from different journals, so there was not a “Special Issue on Sheep and Operations Research”. I love being part of a field where, in a single two month period, there can be five different papers on the application of that field to sheep. There are also two on “cattle” and two on “pigs”. And 10 on “crop yield”!
With only one “sports” paper, perhaps I have backed myself into an unfashionable sub-area.