Volume 32, Number 4, August 2005

Operations researchers have now been at it for more than 65 years and have developed a huge body of knowledge that many of us believe is really useful. However, although we can certainly argue that operations research has improved living standards by reducing the cost of many everyday items, most would agree that we have had little effect on the way that ordinary people live their lives. Resistance to having our materials more broadly adopted comes from the fact that O.R. relies on mathematics for its major impact, and the world is not, by and large, populated with mathematicians.

• Peter C. Bell

INFORMS is running a campaign called “The Science of Better” to educate business executives about the benefits of O.R. This is a welcome and important initiative, and I wish it had happened many years sooner. Back in the days when I was an O.R. consultant in a 100-person O.R. consulting firm, we struggled to explain to potential clients (as well as strangers on airplanes) just what it was that we did that we wanted all that money for. We spent a lot of time wrestling with this problem. We even had a contest to come up with the best short slogan for what we did. (My personal favorite was “Come for the analysis, stay for the pie.”)

• Thomas Grossman

As we go "back to school" with this issue of OR/MS Today, it may be useful to reflect on what we are going to school for. For students, school usually means gainful employment and for their instructors it means, or at least it should mean, getting their students employed. But what do employers want? Alumni, meetings with employers and attending industry conferences provide some answers. Students themselves may learn something from job interviews, whether successful or not. But such information is neither structured nor is it disseminated very well. We take the view that employers state what they want in their recruitment advertisements so we have analyzed 647 ads for O.R. jobs. [For the purposes of this article, the term “O.R.” encompasses both operations research and management science (OR/MS)]. Here we share the preliminary results of our analysis.

• ManMohan Sodhi
• Byung-Gak Son

DR. GEORGE B. DANTZIG, THE “FATHER OF LINEAR PROGRAMMING” and a founding member of The Institute of Management Sciences, died May 13, 2005 in Stanford, Calif. His formal education was as a mathematician which reflected his early interest in the subject and the influence of his father, Tobias Dantzig, a mathematics professor who studied under Henri Poincaré. George’s seminal work can be summed up succinctly as the recognition and definition of the broad class of practical problems that can be studied as linear programs and the development of the simplex algorithm for solving them. These developments came after the beginnings of the emerging field of operations research, as developed by British scientists during World War II. Early books and reports on operations research (O.R.) had little or nothing to say about linear programming. But, before long, George’s work became a central and mainstay feature of O.R. methods and their application.

• Saul Gass

My earliest reminiscence of George Dantzig dates back to 1961 when I was a first-year doctoral student in mathematics at U.C. Berkeley. I was a part-time programmer in the Computer Services Department of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (BRL) and was assigned to debug a large computer program for linear and quadratic programming. This was a real challenge for a person who knew little about computer programming and nothing about LP and QP.

Imagine what it must have been like to meet Euler, Lagrange, Newton or any of the other great mathematicians or scientists of the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries. Those of us who have known George Dantzig had the 20th century equivalent. When historians look back on the great scientific achievements of the past 100 years, George’s magnificent personal contributions and those of the field that he created will be right there with the best of them.