DATE: Thursday, October 12, 2006
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106
ABSTRACT
We review our recent efforts* to develop a history of OR viewed
as a timeline description of events, people, and other influences.
To date, we have identified over 400 such items extending over
400 years. We discuss a biased sample of such items that relate
to the question: How did OR get from there to here? We include
answers to the following OR trivia:
Who first solved the general
n-point facility location problem when he was 16 years old?
Who
wrote the first book on operations research OR methods and when
was it published?
Who was the U.S. World War II OR analysts assigned
to the 8th Air Force in England who later became a Supreme Court
justice?
Why did the economist T.C. Koopmans give away a third
of his 1975 Nobel prize ($40,000) in economics?
*An Annotated
Timeline of Operations Research: An Informal History," S.I.
Gass and A. A. Assad, Springer Science, 2005.
