{"id":172,"date":"2007-07-28T14:38:22","date_gmt":"2007-07-28T18:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=164"},"modified":"2007-07-28T14:38:22","modified_gmt":"2007-07-28T18:38:22","slug":"famous-or-phds-and-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/07\/28\/famous-or-phds-and-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"Famous OR Ph.D.s and authors?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I see that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brian_May\">Brian May<\/a>, guitarist for dinosaur rock group Queen (&#8220;Bohemian Rhapsody&#8221;, &#8220;We are the Champions&#8221;, etc.) is <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20070726\/music_nm\/queen_dc\">finishing off his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics<\/a>.  Nice to have something if that rock &#8216;n roll thing doesn&#8217;t work out.<\/p>\n<p>At the recent &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/guest.cvent.com\/EVENTS\/Info\/Summary.aspx?e=08353bc6-4c4c-46df-bcda-ff5f213736e4\">Georgefest<\/a>&#8221; celebration of George Nemhauser&#8217;s 70th birthday, dinner conversation (for Ralph Gomory, Tom Magnanti, and me) came to &#8220;famous operations research Ph.D.s&#8221;.  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):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Malone\">John Malone<\/a>, chairman of Liberty Media, cable magnate, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/lists\/2007\/10\/07billionaires_John-Malone_ZP8G.html\">number 488<\/a> on <em>Forbes<\/em> magazine&#8217;s billionaires listing (with $2 billion).  Got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.  His paper with Manny Bellmore on the traveling salesman problem continues to be <a href=\"http:\/\/scholar.google.com\/scholar?q=bellmore+malone&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;btnG=Search\">referenced a lot<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bill_Gates\">Bill Gates<\/a> of Microsoft, coauthored <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.berkeley.edu\/~christos\/papers\/Bounds%20For%20Sorting%20By%20Prefix%20Reversal.pdf\">a paper with Christos Papadimitriou<\/a> on a sorting algorithm, though he did not receive a Ph.D. (not counting his four honorary ones).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bengalszone.com\/article.php?sid=541\">Virgil Carter<\/a>, quarterback for the NFL&#8217;s Cincinatti Bengals, wrote papers on football and OR for <a href=\"http:\/\/links.jstor.org\/sici?sici=0030-364X(197103%2F04)19%3A2%3C541%3AOROF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E\"><em>Operations Research<\/em><\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/links.jstor.org\/sici?sici=0025-1909(197812)24%3A16%3C1758%3AOSOFD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M\"><em>Management Science<\/em><\/a> in the 1970s (but did not get a Ph.D.:  he is an MBA from Northwestern).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hedy_Lamarr\">Hedy Lamarr<\/a>, actress and famous beauty, invented a method for hopping frequencies in wireless communication.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dan_Grimaldi\">Dan Gimaldi<\/a>, actor who played the twin Parisi brothers on the <em>Sopranos<\/em>, has a masters in OR and a Ph.D. in data processing.  He has a position in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kingsborough.edu\/academicDepartments\/math\/index.html\">Department of Mathematics and Computer Science<\/a> at Kingsborough Community College.  Anyone know what he works on?<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ralph_Gomory\">Gomory<\/a> himself is a good example:  <a href=\"http:\/\/scholar.google.com\/scholar?q=gomory&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;btnG=Search\">terrific OR credentials<\/a> but even better known as President of the Sloan Foundation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Gates and Lamarr aren&#8217;t really OR, but they are close.  There are a number of famous economists with OR backgrounds (for instance, my friend <a href=\"http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/economics\/laureates\/2004\/kydland-autobio.html\">Finn Kydland<\/a>, 2004 Nobel laureate is really an OR person in the guise of an economist &#8212; 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I see that Brian May, guitarist for dinosaur rock group Queen (&#8220;Bohemian Rhapsody&#8221;, &#8220;We are the Champions&#8221;, etc.) is finishing off his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics. Nice to have something if that rock &#8216;n roll thing doesn&#8217;t work out. At the recent &#8220;Georgefest&#8221; celebration of George Nemhauser&#8217;s 70th birthday, dinner conversation (for Ralph Gomory, Tom &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/07\/28\/famous-or-phds-and-authors\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Famous OR Ph.D.s and authors?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}