First awarded in 1974 by ORSA, the George E. Kimball Medal honors a pioneer of operations research during the World War II era. The award, presented for the first time this year by INFORMS following the merger of ORSA and TIMS, incorporates both the ORSA Kimball Medal and the TIMS Distinguished Service Award.
Norden was cited for 37 years of distinguished service as an applied scientist and educator. Norden has served on numerous committees of both ORSA and TIMS, including a stint as vice president for Publications. He is currently a member of the INFORMS Outreach Committee and is nominating chair for the College on the Practice of Management Science.
An adjunct professor of IE/OR at Columbia University's Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Science since 1952, Dr. Norden has also enjoyed a long association with IBM during which time he "contributed significantly to the development and use of management science technologies in project management systems, scheduling, computing and information systems, and artificial intelligence/expert systems."
Saying he was "profoundly honored" by the award, Dr. Norden delighted the luncheon audience with a brief speech that referenced an eclectic cast of characters, ranging from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Margaret Meade to Abraham Lincoln. For the benefit of those not in attendance, following is a transcript of his remarks.
"Mr. Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen:
"Do not be afraid; as Zsa Zsa Gabor said to her fifth husband, 'I won't keep you long!'
"Just know that I am profoundly honored by this award.
"But let me assure you that what I have received from my work with our societies far exceeded what little I gave. I am deeply grateful for the opportunities my association with many members and the profession have afford me. If I have not exactly stood on the shoulders of giants, I have rubbed shoulders with many, too numerous to mention.
"In the 1970s, Jay Forrester of MIT speculated that most of the endeavors of mankind could be modeled with a concatenation of some 20 basic DYNAMO models. Now, I think, he might have second thoughts about this. I believe we are well into the 'Age of Complexity,' and to cope with it may well be the top task of humankind as a species. Back in the '50s already Margaret Meade observed that our greatest cultural challenge is 'Change without Precedent'; a clarion-call to rapid paradigm adaptation if I ever heard one! Simple-minded algorithms won't do any more. INFORMS has the challenge of leadership into a millennium of manageable implementation of quantifiable insights. Among these are the skills of meta-modeling: making higher-order harmonics, fuzzy phenomena, chaos, fractals and discontinuities usable, useful and tractable. With luck, we'll leave the 'middle ages' without entering 'millenopause.'
"Our founding fathers had a profound and brilliant insight when they created one of our predecessor societies, TIMS, to be 'An International Society to Identify, Extend and Unify Scientific Knowledge Pertaining to Management.' It's just hard to believe that that was already 42 years ago! What would Abe Lincoln say to us on this happy occasion? Perhaps this:
"Two score and two years ago, our bettors brought forth on this continent a new discipline, conceived in logic and dedicated to the proposition that all enterprise can be created manageable. Now we are engaged in a great argument, testing whether that vision or any vision so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we can't concatenate, we cannot model this field. The great men, living and dead, who went before us have left us algorithms far beyond our own small power to add or subtract. So let us, here, solemnly resolve that our discipline shall have a new gift or insight, and that the application of the sciences to management, for management and, yeah, even by management shall not perish from the earth.
"Thank you again for this singular and much appreciated honor!"