WRussell Lincoln Ackoff was an American organizational theorist, consultant, and Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Ackoff was a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science.
WMichel Louis Balinski was an applied mathematician, economist, operations research analyst and political scientist. As a Polish-American, educated in the United States, he lived and worked primarily in the United States and France. He was known for his work in optimisation, convex polyhedra, stable matching, and the theory and practice of electoral systems, jury decision, and social choice. He was Directeur de Recherche de classe exceptionnelle (emeritus) of the C.N.R.S. at the École Polytechnique (Paris). He was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by INFORMS in 2013.
WRajiv D. Banker is an accounting researcher and educator, recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the 150 most influential researchers in economics and business. He is the Director of the Center for Accounting and Information Technology at the Fox School of Business and Management, Temple University. He is also President of the International Data Envelopment Analysis Society and Editor-in-Chief of the Data Envelopment Analysis Journal.
WDimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.
WWilliam John Cook is an American operations researcher and mathematician, and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he joined the faculty in 2018. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is known for his work on the traveling salesman problem and is one of the authors of the Concorde TSP Solver.
WGérard Pierre Cornuéjols is the IBM University Professor of Operations Research in the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. His research interests include facility location, integer programming, balanced matrices, and perfect graphs.
WGeorge Bernard Dantzig was an American mathematical scientist who made contributions to industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics.
WHugh Everett III was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his "relative state" formulation. In contrast to the then-dominant Copenhagen interpretation, the MWI posits that the Schrödinger equation never collapses and that all possibilities of a quantum superposition are objectively real.
WJay Wright Forrester was a pioneering American computer engineer and systems scientist. He is credited with being one of the inventors of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory during the most explosive years of digital computer development. It was part of a family of related technologies which bridged the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors by exploiting the magnetic properties of materials to perform switching and amplification.
WHarold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
WRichard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
WDaniel J. Kleitman is an American mathematician and professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research.
WGeorge Lann Nemhauser is an American operations researcher, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former president of the Operations Research Society of America.
WJohn von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians". He integrated pure and applied sciences.
WA. Alan B. Pritsker was an American engineer, pioneer in the field of Operations research, and one of the founders of the field of computer simulation. Over the course of a fifty-five-year career, he made numerous contributions to the field of simulation and to the larger fields of industrial engineering and operations research.
WRalph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text “Convex Analysis” (1970), which has been cited more than 27000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
WAlvin Elliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economics Association in 2017.
WAndrzej Piotr Ruszczyński is a Polish-American applied mathematician, noted for his contributions to mathematical optimization, in particular, stochastic programming and risk-averse optimization.
WThomas L. Saaty was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process (ANP), its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. Later on, he generalized the mathematics of the ANP to the Neural Network Process (NNP) with application to neural firing and synthesis but none of them gain such popularity as AHP.
WSuresh P. Sethi is Eugene McDermott Chair Professor of Operations Management and Director of the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks (C4ISN) at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has contributed significantly in the fields of manufacturing and operations management, finance and economics, marketing, industrial engineering, operations research, and optimal control. He is well known for his developments of the Sethi advertising model and DNSS Points, and for his textbook on optimal control.
WGerald L. Thompson was the IBM Professor of Systems and Operations Research (Emeritus) in the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University.
WAbraham Wald was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician who contributed to decision theory, geometry, and econometrics, and founded the field of statistical sequential analysis. One of the well known statistical works of his during World War 2 was how to minimize the damage to bomber aircraft taking into account the survivorship bias in his calculations. He spent his researching years at Columbia University.
WStephen Warshall was an American computer scientist. During his career, Warshall carried out research and development in operating systems, compiler design, language design, and operations research. Warshall died on December 11, 2006 of cancer at his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is survived by his wife, Sarah Dunlap, and two children, Andrew D. Warshall and Sophia V. Z. Warshall.
WThomson McLintock Whitin was an American management scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Economics and Social Sciences at Wesleyan University, known for his work on inventory control and inventory management.