Saul Gass is one of the great people in OR. In celebration of his 80th birthday, friends and colleagues gathered in Maryland in February for a Festschrift. The book of this celebration is coming out from Springer (Amazon link given, since I can’t find it on Springer: buy it at the conference since often they give a conference discount). Saul will be signing the book from 3-4:30 PM Monday November 6 at the INFORMS Meeting. I bet he would sign some of his other books (like The Annotated Timeline with Arjan Assad, his classic Linear Programming: Methods and Applications reprinted by Dover, or if you are particularly well-heeled, his Encyclopedia of Operations Research with the late Carl Harris) if you asked nicely.
Category: Books
Applications of Optimization with Xpress-MP
There are very few books out about how to model problems in linear and integer programming. Hugh Williams book “Model Building in Mathematical Programming” is one. The documentation that comes with commercial software is another resource. Dash Optimization has made their “Applications of Optimization with Xpress-MP” available for free download. This book goes beyond the standard “3 variable 2 constraint” models found in so many textbooks.
Google Scholar and OR
One issue in faculty reviews is trying to determine the effect the research of a faculty member is having. For that, we do things like get outside letters, read papers, and so on. In the past, we also checked things like the Science Citation Index for counts on how often a paper is referenced. Recently, Google Scholar has taken on that role, for better or worse. It is better than SCI in the sense it lists very recent references that may not be in the published literature yet. It also is very wide ranging, catching things SCI doesn’t catch. Of course, it may also catch garbage, but that is the tradeoff. It also undercounts older papers that don’t have as strong an online presence.
One surrogate for “effect” is number of references in Google Scholar. I thought it would be interesting to see the OR work with the most references. Here are a few I found:
- Dantzig (Linear Programming and Extensions): 1384
- Garey and Johnson (Computers and Intractibility): 12334 plus other editions
- Nemhauser and Wolsey (Integer Programming): 2199
- Rockafellar (Convex Analysis): 4470
- Schrijver (Theory of Integer and Linear Programming): 1866
- Papadimitriou and Steiglitz (Combinatorial Optimization): 2364
- Ahuja, Magnanti, and Orlin (Network Flows): 2037
- Karmarkar (16th ACM Polynomial Time Linear Programming): 1329
- Trick (hah!, Cliques, Coloring and Satisfiability): 126
So I have Papadimitriou and Steiglitz (deciding Rockafellar and Garey and Johnson are not “really” OR) as the most referenced book and Karmarkar as the most referenced paper. Anybody beat that?
Want to learn more about Constraint Programming?
Thom Frühwirth and Slim Abdennadher have a book called “Essentials of Constraint Programming”. Best of all, Thom has more than 400 powerpoint slides on his website to supplement the book.
Applied Mathematical Programming
One of my all time favorite textbooks is Applied Mathematical Programming by Bradley, Hax, and Magnanti. This text is now available on the web!
Book blurb
Springer has just published a new book containing introductory tutorials on a range of optimization subjects: Search Methodologies: Introductory Tutorials in Optimization and Decision Support Techniques. Of course, I have a vested interest: Bob Bosch and I wrote the Integer Programming chapter, which I think came out quite nice!