LIFE IS FULL OF UNCERTAINTY. HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN IT, LET ALONE PLAN FOR IT? Take the career of George Bernard Dantzig, for example. The son of a mathematician and the “Father of Linear Programming” – not to mention the inventor of the simplex method and one of the most revered figures in the history of operations research – Dantzig nearly flunked out of his ninth-grade algebra class.
Volume 32, Number 3, June 2005
FEATURE ARTICLES
DIGITAL EDITION
DEPARTMENTS 
Inside Story
Remembering the Great GBD
George Bernard Dantzig, widely known as the “Father of Linear Programming,” passed away on May 13 at the age of 90, leaving behind a legacy of mathematical achievement and humanity that few, if any, can match. The word “legend” is often hastily attached to individuals before it’s earned these days, but such is not the case with the truly legendary “GBD.”
President's Desk
Practice What We Preach
Many INFORMS members either work for or consult for firms or governmental organizations, offering O.R. advice. We bring with us a vast arsenal of tools and techniques. But perhaps even more importantly, we bring with us an O.R. perspective that allows us to frame and formulate problems. We insist on learning what the customer wants, on defining performance measures and in general on creating a decision-oriented structure aimed at systematic improvement based on quantitative measures.
Issues in Education
The Case for Teaching O.R. at Liberal Arts Institutions
Less than a decade ago, I graduated from a well-known liberal arts school in the South with an undergraduate degree in mathematics. When nearing the end of my college career, I found myself in the all-too-common state of uncertainty about my future. For lack of any other ideas, I decided to look at graduate schools in mathematics. I wrote away for some brochures and, from one school, I received a pamphlet about its O.R. program. My response was, “Or what?” I had never heard the words “operations” and “research” spoken together, so I certainly didn’t know what the field of O.R. entailed. After a visit to the famous “Mike Trick’s O.R. Page” on the Web, I decided to give it a try. I applied to a few master’s programs in OR/MS along with the math programs I had been looking at originally.
INFORMS in the News
Big Changes Coming Soon
When INFORMS Online was started in 1995, it consisted of a few hundred HTML pages and a handful of Perl scripts. The pages were mostly maintained by hand-editing HTML source or by running scripts on flat-file databases to generate HTML pages. The scripts were self-contained, so each had to include all the elements that made up the pages: headers, footers, links to background and foreground images, etc. Because every page was hand-edited, only relatively primitive design elements could be included. In those days, this is how most sites were maintained.
INFORMS Initiatives
CAP update, Doing Good, Grand Challenges
Developing new test questions that keep the Certified Analytics Professional (CAP®) exam fresh is an important component of making certain CAP remains the premier global certification for analytics practitioners. The Analytics Certification Board and staff thank Innovative Decisions, Inc. (IDI) and especially Freeman Marvin, CAP, for recently hosting an item-writing workshop at their headquarters in Vienna, Va., as part of this ongoing effort.
Viewpoint
Life, Death and Taxes: Risk and Decision Analysis in Patient Safety
Health care systems can be extremely complex. They consist of interacting and constantly changing human and equipment (devices, hardware, software) elements, and thus are associated with a high degree of uncertainty and are prone to failures. Hippocrates admonished health care providers to “do no harm,” but, for example, a recent study [Baker et al. 2004] reported that 185,000 adverse events occur annually in Canadian hospitals (an approximate 7.5 percent error rate!). Similar rates have been found in other countries. This is unacceptable by any measure.
Industry News
Frontline Launches New Solver, Related Products
Frontline Systems, Inc., developer of the Solver in Microsoft Excel, has unveiled a new “flagship” product for optimization software developers, the Solver Platform SDK, and a related full product line upgrade, Version 6.5 of its Premium Solver, Premium Solver Platform and Solver Engines for Microsoft Excel.
ORacle
The Anthropologist’s Parable
The crowd roared as the home team’s center fielder lined a double to left-center, driving in two runs and tying the game in the bottom of the seventh. “This couldn’t get much better,” the O.R. analyst exulted. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to see major league baseball back in D.C. But here we are, and our guys might even win. Thanks for inviting us, Charlie!”