{"id":863,"date":"2009-09-21T10:46:47","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T14:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=863"},"modified":"2009-09-21T10:46:47","modified_gmt":"2009-09-21T14:46:47","slug":"the-true-measure-of-a-persons-real-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/09\/21\/the-true-measure-of-a-persons-real-worth\/","title":{"rendered":"The True Measure of a Person’s Real Worth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inspired by Jon Cryer<\/a>‘s comments on (finally) winning an Emmy last night:<\/p>\n

You know, I used to think that awards were just shallow tokens of momentary popularity but \u2014 I realize they are the only true measure of person\u2019s real worth as a human being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I thought I would ‘fess up about an award or two coming the way of yours truly (“Aaah, shucks, you shouldn’t have!”).<\/p>\n

First, the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo has tapped me for their 2009 Alumni Achievement Medal<\/a>.\u00a0 While I only spent two and a half years as an undergraduate at Waterloo (I had spent two years at the University of Manitoba), those years were incredibly important to my path.\u00a0 I got my B.Math. degree\u00a0 from two departments:\u00a0 Computer Science and Combinatorics and Optimization.<\/p>\n

\"edmonds\"You have to love a place with a Faculty of Mathematics and a 29 faculty strong Department of Combinatorics and Optimization.\u00a0\u00a0 I was particularly attached to C&O and was inspired to enter the field of operations research due to the training I got there.\u00a0\u00a0 I was strongly affected by two faculty members on the opposite sides of practically any spectrum.\u00a0 The first was Jack Edmonds, who founded combinatorial optimization with his work on matchings and his recognition of the key divide between polynomial and exponential algorithms.\u00a0 While that work was done in the 1960s, Jack has remained a prolific and influential researcher to this day.\u00a0 From Jack, I learned the beauty of this field.<\/p>\n

The second person I was strongly influenced by will be less familiar to most:\u00a0 Richard N. Burns.\u00a0 Rick did research primarily in nurse scheduling.\u00a0 We worked together two summers on my first operations research projects.\u00a0 The first project was for Domtar, a Canadian paper products company, on scheduling a cardboard cutting machine.\u00a0 For this project, I got my first computer (this was 1980 or so):\u00a0 a CP\/M based system<\/a>.\u00a0 It was a fantastic project that taught me both the pleasures and the frustrations of doing real-world operations research.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Exhilarating when things went well; devastating when the code just wouldn’t work.\u00a0 But finally we got things to work well and the system went into use.\u00a0 In retrospect, I now see that the work we were doing could be seen as an early precursor to branch-and-price<\/a>, a topic that has fascinated me ever since.<\/p>\n

While the Domtar project was a research project, the second project I did with Rick was a consulting project, putting together a nurse scheduling system.\u00a0 By the time we had added in time tracking, accounting, payroll, capacity planning, and a few other things, I learned the definition of mission creep:\u00a0 I am not sure that system ever got finished!\u00a0 But that too was a great experience.\u00a0 I enjoyed working with Rick very much, and from him I learned the pleasures of applying operations research in the real world.\u00a0 I’ve lost track of Rick (he seems to have retired from academia, so I don’t even have a photo of him:\u00a0 if any of you do, please pass it along!) but he continues to have a strong effect on me.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, Rick and Jack were quite different in their approaches to the world of operations research (if you know both of them, you know they were different in lots of other ways too!) but when it came time for a recommendation of where to go to graduate school they both, independently, suggested the same place: Georgia Tech<\/a> Industrial and Systems Engineering, which turned out to be the ideal place for me.<\/p>\n

I am thrilled that the Faculty of Mathematics picked me for their Alumni Achievement Medal.\u00a0 The list of past recipients <\/a>is very impressive indeed!\u00a0 I pick up the medal at a banquet on Thursday which Alexander and I will drive up for (Ilona being in Europe at the moment).<\/p>\n

The second award is … well, maybe I better wait until the INFORMS San Diego Meeting<\/a> to talk about that.<\/p>\n

Finally, though not really an award (perhaps a penalty might be a better term), I am now the Associate Dean, Research here at the Tepper School.\u00a0 Given the research traditions of this school<\/a> (and not just in OR!), I am really pleased to be part of making a great school even better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inspired by Jon Cryer‘s comments on (finally) winning an Emmy last night: You know, I used to think that awards were just shallow tokens of momentary popularity but \u2014 I realize they are the only true measure of person\u2019s real worth as a human being. I thought I would ‘fess up about an award or … Continue reading “The True Measure of a Person’s Real Worth”<\/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":[41,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-prizes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","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=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}