Peter V. Norden: May 26, 1924 – June 1, 2020

Peter V. Norden, INFORMS Fellow, former president of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), and 40-year employee at IBM whose 75-year affiliation with Columbia University included three degrees as a student and a long stint as an adjunct professor of industrial engineering and operations research dating back to the 1950s, passed away June 1 at the age of 96. Along with his lengthy and remarkable professional and academic career, Norden was beloved and often remembered by his countless colleagues, friends and students for his humility, humanity and quick wit.

“Anyone who spends even a few minutes with Professor Norden quickly recognizes his kindness, humility, determination and multifaceted intelligence,” said Ken Fordyce, a former IBM colleague and longtime friend of Norden on the occasion of Norden receiving the Tannenbaum-Warner Award for Distinguished Service at Columbia. “A quick poll of some of his colleagues named ‘word puns’ as No. 1 – at least in terms of entertainment.”

Professor Norden received his bachelor’s (1950), master’s (1952) and Ph.D. (1964) degrees from Columbia University studying mathematics, mechanical and industrial engineering and operations research, after which he went on to a long career with IBM, specializing in the application of quantitative techniques to management problems and project management systems. At IBM, Norden’s assignments spanned a wide array of responsibilities, including software development and market support for knowledge-based and expert systems applications for manufacturing, process and utilities industries.

As manager of an engineering and scientific support center in White Plains, N.Y., Norden was responsible for all of IBM’s scientific software, touching upon numerous operations research methodologies including optimization, simulation, project management, statistics, artificial intelligence and decision support systems. Toward the end of his career, Norden was a consultant with the company’s management technologies practice, having held a similar position with its manufacturing research department.

INFORMS, TIMS Volunteer

Professor Norden’s volunteer work on behalf of INFORMS and TIMS, which merged with the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) to create INFORMS in 1995, was also extensive. In addition to his TIMS presidential term (1971-1972), Norden helped establish Interfaces, the practice publication of INFORMS now known as the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics. Norden was also a founder and president of the College on the Practice of Management Sciences (CPMS), and for many years he served as a judge and coach for the Franz Edelman Award competition. For his dedicated service to INFORMS and the professional management sciences community, Norden received the George E. Kimball Medal in 1995.

“I had the pleasure of working with Peter multiple times on Edelman judging committees. His amazing wit and sense of humor are memorable,” recalls Srinivas Bollapragada of GE Research. “I was looking through some old emails from him that I was copied on and found two of his ‘Pete-Nordenisms,’ as he called them. When Steven Strauss volunteered to chair the Practice Cluster at the 2009 Annual Meeting, Peter thanked him and commented, ‘I’m sure you’ll muster a cluster with substance, not bluster!’ When he could not attend Saul Gass’ 80th birthday celebration, he requested Randy Robinson to convey his best wishes and tell him that ‘he’s the highest-octane Gass of my personal acquaintance!’ His service to O.R. and INFORMS is remarkable. May his soul rest in peace.”

Longtime INFORMS member John Milne says Norden was “always one with a colorful phrase,” adding an example: “Shortly before I joined Clarkson University, Peter told me, ‘In academia, the politics are so subtle, you don’t know you’ve been stabbed in the back until you see the blood on your shoes.’”

Walks and Talks with Ike

In an email, longtime INFORMS member Howard Finkelberg wrote that Norden was a “link to the early days of O.R. and to a different era entirely. I was particularly fond of his reminiscences of his walks and talks with Dwight Eisenhower when they were at Columbia – Ike as university president and Peter as student body president. Peter got me increasingly involved in his Organization & Management Seminar at Columbia, where he emphasized bringing as many viewpoints as possible to bear on the subject. Seminar members included doctors, lawyers and bankers, as well as O.R. practitioners and academics. Peter would introduce each seminar with a pun-filled (we once clocked him at 20 puns per hour) recap of the day’s topic, replete with his famous charts and a seemingly endless supply of relevant newspaper clippings.”

Norden’s famous charts also proved memorable to Martin Starr, a former TIMS president and colleague of Norden’s at Columbia, who wrote in an email: “Peter had diagrams that he would pull out every now and then that would cause me to have a Eureka moment. Generally, this would not be immediate. Rather it would be after as much as a day or two of pondering what his graphic was trying to say.”

From 2004-2009, Fordyce had the “unique opportunity” to co-teach an IE senior project class and an engineering of management class with Norden. Recalls Fordyce: “These classes … established a model that is now replicated at many institutions. Many a student came in thinking this ‘soft stuff was easy’ and left clearly understanding how challenging and energizing practice really was. Each year Professor Norden would quietly convey golden nuggets to the students that over the course of the semester became a diverse but tightly woven fabric. In fact, I would bring back some of these golden nuggets to share with a very experienced team. One of my favorites is, ‘Assume your audience is very intelligent but knows nothing about your topic.’”

Sources: John Milne, Ken Fordyce, INFORMS, Columbia University