OR/MS Today - December 1999

December 1999

It's a Wonderful Profession

By Thomas Magnanti
magnanti@mit.edu

People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.

— Saint Augustine

In writing this, my final "from the President's desk" column, I was tempted to observe the custom of the times and develop a best-of-the-century list or extract relevant OR/MS citations from other lists. For example, the November-December 1999 issue of the journal Computing in Science and Engineering, a joint publication of IEEE and the American Institute of Physics, lists the top-10 algorithms of the century. This list includes the simplex method alongside such notable algorithms as the fast Fourier transform and the Metropolis algorithm. These lists are both enjoyable and illuminating, and seeing topics such as simplex method appear on them can be inspiring.

Instead of attempting to create such a list, I thought that I might take the impending end of the century and the millennium as an occasion to celebrate. I am an unabashed fan of operations research and management science. I see beauty in the field's intellectual content. I am gratified that every time I use the telephone or take an airplane, I am benefiting from the fruits of OR/MS. When I look at the world around me, I see OR/MS issues and opportunities everywhere. I am exhilarated by what the field has accomplished and what it can accomplish.

I am thrilled that OR/MS has had such a significant impact on the world. In education, for example, the field played a central role in defining the modern business school with its focus on model-based modes of analysis. It also played a prominent role in transforming education in the broad field of industrial engineering. Indeed, today it is hard to imagine a university with an industrial engineering department that is not anchored on operations research.

Several events of just the past few months illustrate the marvels of operations research and management science.

OR/MS has contributed to exciting technical developments. I was excited when I had the opportunity at our last national meeting to present the INFORMS President's Award to Leonard Kleinrock for his seminal OR contributions to the birth and development of the Internet, one of the most important technical developments of this century.

OR/MS has a significant impact on practice. I was excited when at the same meeting, in accepting the INFORMS Prize, Nick Donofrio, one of IBM's most senior officers, applauds operations research and management science and indicates how instrumental this field has been and will be to one of the world's most successful companies.

I am excited when IBM reports a $750 million dollar impact of its Edelman Prize-winning asset management tool to improve its supply chains.

OR/MS addresses important issues of our times. I am excited when Professor Jesse Ausubel in his article "Five Worthy Ways to Spend Large Amounts of Money for Research on Environment and Resources" in the National Academy of Engineering publication The Bridge (Volume 29, Number 3, Fall 1999) states that "Universities should be producing the needed engineers, operations researchers, and physicists, and government should partner with industry on the prototypes" when discussing the potential of advanced high-speed magnetic levitation (maglev) systems for transportation.

OR/MS affects many professions. I am excited when computer scientists use hidden Markov chains as a basic tool in speech recognition systems or integer programming as a modeling and analysis tool to create new ways to parallelize computer algorithms, when electrical engineers use linear and integer programming to design digital filters, and when financial analysts use stochastic models to create and analyze new financial instruments.

OR/MS has grown into a vibrant field. I am excited when I think about the growth of OR/MS as a field from its inception some 50 years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 50,000 operations researchers in the United States and the Census Bureau reports 250,000. IFORS member societies around the world now have 27,500 members.

OR/MS is widely recognized. I was excited when at the recent Dantzig Fest at the Philadelphia national meeting, letters by the presidents of several major professional societies including IEEE and SIAM exclaimed the important contributions of linear programming and optimization in their fields.

OR/MS is pervasive. I am excited by the range of methodologies and applications that OR/MS addresses. For example, our last national meeting had clusters in such diverse fields as financial services, the pharmaceutical industry, health care, reliability and quality engineering, information systems, manufacturing, logistics, organizational learning and web-based commerce.

I have drawn the title of this article from the celebrated Frank Capra movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart does not recognize the contributions he has made to his hometown and the esteem that he has earned. Like Saint Augustine, Capra tells us that we should not pass by ourselves without acknowledging, indeed celebrating, what we have. OR/MS is a wonderful field and I am proud that it is my profession. Indeed, I couldn't imagine a better profession to be in.

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