Category: People

Famous OR Ph.D.s and authors?

I see that Brian May, guitarist for dinosaur rock group Queen (“Bohemian Rhapsody”, “We are the Champions”, etc.) is finishing off his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics. Nice to have something if that rock ‘n roll thing doesn’t work out.

At the recent “Georgefest” celebration of George Nemhauser’s 70th birthday, dinner conversation (for Ralph Gomory, Tom Magnanti, and me) came to “famous operations research Ph.D.s”. Of course, the interest was not those famous for OR, but famous for something else. Here is what we came up with, augmented with a bit of web search after dinner (either with a Ph.D. or with a well known OR paper):

Gates and Lamarr aren’t really OR, but they are close. There are a number of famous economists with OR backgrounds (for instance, my friend Finn Kydland, 2004 Nobel laureate is really an OR person in the guise of an economist — trust me, Finn, that is is compliment!) but economics is pretty close to OR at times. So who else has an OR PhD or a paper in the OR literature but is better known outside of our field?

Blogs and Labs

Why don’t more research labs have blogs? Most of us are passionate about our fields and our perspective on the world. For instance, I really believe operations research is a great way to view the world, and I trust that comes out through the blog.

David Goldberg of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois is another with a passionate view of how his lab’s research fits into the world, and it comes through in the lab blog. I even get a mention as “worth a read”. David is, of course, a guru on genetic algorithms, an area I consider part of operations research, though I suspect David disagrees. In any case, we need more discussion and even conflict if our field is to be taken seriously.

Another lab with a blog is at the Missouri Estimation of Distribution Algorithms Lab.  To be honest, I did not know what an “Estimation of Distribution Algorithm” (EDA) was.  I do now, due to the blog.

Brenda Dietrich in Fast Company

Brenda Dietrich,  President of INFORMS and head of Math Sciences at IBM Watson Research is profiled in Fast Company this month.  Some wonderful stories:

If you’re not a mathematician, the deep math that Dietrich and her team perform sounds utterly foreign–combinatorial auctions, integer programming, conditional logic, and so on. Their whiteboard scribbles at Watson look incomprehensible, like Farsi or Greek (then again, many of the symbols are Greek). But these mysterious equations represent the real world and how it works. When mathematicians “model” a problem, they’re creating a numerical snapshot of a dynamic system and its variables.

Take the forest-fire project Dietrich and the researchers are working on. Extinguishing fast-spreading flames over tens of thousands of acres is an expensive and complicated undertaking. In 2000, a particularly devastating year, the federal government spent more than $1 billion and still lost more then 8 million acres. Its fire planners want to reduce the cost and the damage through better coordination among the five agencies involved.

Armed with seven years of data, IBM’s mathematicians are creating an enormous model that shows how the resources–every firefighter, truck, plane, etc.–have been used in the past, how much each effort cost, and how many acres burned. The algorithms describe the likely costs and results for any number of strategies to combat a given fire. “How many bulldozers and buckets do you keep in Yellowstone Park?” Dietrich asks. “And if you need to move them elsewhere, how much will it cost and how long will it take?” She’s talking fast, describing the unruly variables that math makes sense of. “It’s a nice project. Complicated, huh?”

It is too bad that Brenda is described as a mathematician (which she is) rather than the more specific and accurate “Operations Researcher”.

Death of Peter Hammer

Peter HammerIt is with great sadness that I pass along news of the death of Peter Hammer. Here is the announcement I received from Endre Boros:

It is with deep sorrow that I have to inform you of the tragic death in a car accident of Professor Peter L. Hammer on December 27, 2006. His wife Anca, the only other passenger in the car, is recovering from minor injuries.

Below is information on the funeral for Dr. Hammer.

The funeral will take place on Sunday, December 31, 2006, at 1pm. The location is the Princeton Cemetery (29 Greenview Ave Princeton, NJ 08542) .

Telegraphs or cards can be sent to the family (wife Anca, and sons Alex and Max) at 19 Littlebrook Road North, Princeton, NJ 08540-4063.

Flowers can be sent to the Princeton Cemetery, 29 Greenview Ave Princeton,
NJ 08542.

Directions to the Princeton Cemetery: From Nassau Street (the main street of Princeton, State Rt. 27) turn onto Vandeventer Avenue (opposite to Washington Avenue), after 0.2 mi (at the end of Vandeventer) turn left on Wiggins Street, and then immediately (128ft) right onto Greenview Avenue.

Peter has been an amazing force in our field, and an inspiration to all of us. His passing is a tremendous blow, both personally, and to the field.

Added January 4

Rutcor has a page on Prof. Hammer.  It includes the following:

His family collects stories, facts, thoughts, feelings, and even rumors about Peter L. Hammer. Please email your comments to: maximhammer@yahoo.com.

Contribution in His Memory may be made to:

Post-Polio Health International (PHI)
4207 Lindell Boulevard
St. Louis, Missouri 63108-2915
USA

either by writing a check to Post-Polio Health International or directly through their website http://www.post-polio.org/don-mem.html

Please, kindly mention “In Memory of Peter Hammer”.

OR Takes Over …

… the University of Delaware, at least. Pat Harker, former editor of Operations Research and plenary speaker at this year’s INFORMS conference, has been selected as President of the University of Delaware. Interesting career trajectory: OR faculty to Dean of Wharton to university President. And he is only 48! Being 46 myself, I console myself thinking “if only I hadn’t given him a two year headstart”. Congrats, Pat!

EURO Gold Medal Winner

The winner of this year’s EURO Gold Medel is Luk Van Wassenhove. Luk is having an amazing career, and I am delighted in this award to him. In my previous incarnation as President of the Carnegie Bosch Institute, I was able to support some of his work in full cycle logistics and he was a member of my Advisory Committee. Congratulations Luk!

In addition to his work in reverse logistics, Luk has also been a creator of the field “Humanitarian Logistics”. Luk began with work with the Red Cross, trying to change their view from “responsiveness” to preparation.

Sad News from India

From the Indian Express:

Terror struck an international conference at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus on Wednesday night killing a retired Mathematics professor from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, M.C. Puri, and seriously injuring four others including one of the inventors of the Simputer, Prof Vijay Chandru from IISc.

The attack was, according to eyewitness accounts, carried out by a lone gunman who wielded an AK-47 and threw hand grenades. The attacker was driven away in a white Ambassador car immediately after the attack, eyewitnesses said.

All major cities in south India have been put on high alert after the incident.

The other injured persons have been identified as Dr Pankaj Gupta from Delhi, P Patel, a lab assistant at the Cadila Lab in the IISc campus, and a woman identified only as Sonia, an assistant professor at IIM, Lucknow.

‘‘All the injured have been ruled to be out of danger,’’ Additional Commissioner of Police H C Kishore Chandra said.

Delegates at the International Conference on Operations Research Applications in Infrastructure Development and the 38th Annual convention of Operation Research Society of India (ORSI) were proceeding from IISc’s National Science Seminar Complex to the Satish Dhawan auditorium for an AGM of the ORSI at around 7:30 p.m. when the attack took place.

Full Story

Vijay Chandru is a co-author of mine, and my thoughts are with him, the others injured and the family of Prof. Puri.

Luk Van Wassenhove and IFORS Distinguished Lecturer

Luk Van Wassenhove was the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer at this year’s INFORMS conference. Here he is receiving congratulations from Tom Magnanti (right), President of IFORS.

Luk spoke on “Closed Loop Supply Chains: Past, Present, and Future”. Closed-loop supply chains are those where the supply chain bringing goods from consumers back to suppliers is also important. Luk gave an interesting historical perspective on this rather young field. He suggested that the field has gone through 5 phases:

1) Technical remanufacturing. Research into how to best remanufacture/resuse returned items, with little regard to how they come back or where they go after remanufacturing.

2) Valuing reverse logistics. Research and interest in how items coming back to a supplier can create value for that supplier. These models are more market driven than just waste stream recovery, and address the front end acquisition of items.

3) Coordinating decisions, bringing the forward supply chain together with the reverse supply chain. Once the magnitude of the problem is realized, the reverse chain impacts the forward chain, and vice versa.

4) Closing the loop, with dynamic decisions over the lifecycle of products. One aspect of this is the need to spend money to make money. Consider a “recycled” computer: one that is only a few weeks old is much more valuable than one that is months old. In such a case, investments might need to be made to increase the speed of the reverse supply chain.

5) The final phase of research, which perhaps should have been the first one, is “Is there a market”? While this area has increased in academic stature, and there are visible, but isolated, examples in practice, how can these insights be embedded in real firms. This brings in issues of accounting (how should returns be valued) and marketing (how should cannibalism be handled between original and remanufactured products)?

This was an ideal plenary session: broad, understandable and interesting.