OR/MS Today - February 2000 - President's Desk

February 2000

Millenium Mania

By John Birge
jrbirge@nwu.edu

The ends of the second millennium and 20th century (even if they will not occur until Dec. 31, 2000) have fostered innumerable lists of the greatest achievements in the preceding thousand or hundred years. I am sure you have seen your share of these lists. You might even have debated whether M.J. really should be placed above the Babe, or perhaps whether "Citizen Kane" deserved recognition over "The Seventh Seal." Since Tom Magnanti refrained from giving his "best of OR/MS" list last issue, I decided to accept the challenge and give one view in this, my first President's Desk column. My list has only five choices instead of the customary 10. For the final five, I invite your comments, suggested additions and deletions on the INFORMS On-Line web page, www.informs.org.

For a 50-year-old field, I suppose that concocting a list of the greatest achievements of the past thousand years is a bit presumptuous. Nevertheless, I will forge ahead and look for some historical antecedents to make our history a bit more complete. Prior to the 20th century, we might find few possible nominations for a "best of" list, but the 17th century development of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz merits some recognition for its introduction of a process for describing optimal solutions. Characterizing optima was indeed the focus of much of the development of the calculus, as in Leibniz's presentation of differential calculus entitled "Nova Methodus Pro Maximus et Minimus," or a "New Method for Maximum and Minimum," which could be the title of a contemporary OR/MS article as well. With this reasoning, I pick the development of calculus as my first choice for the best OR/MS of the past millennium.

While the calculus may have introduced the mathematical concept of minimum and maximum, the principle for finding a best choice does not appear to have entered the workplace until the 19th century with Frederick Winslow Taylor's development of scientific management. This concept now has negative connotations of a mechanistic view of human work, but Taylor's basic principle was that scientific inquiry could lead to optimal operations. As described in Robert Kanigel's biography of Taylor, "The One Best Way," that principle was necessary for 20th century industrial development. I concur and include the development of scientific management as second on my best of OR/MS list.

The late 19th century and early 20th century also produced useful mathematical concepts that did not immediately find their way to optimizing operations but have significantly influenced OR/MS. From these achievements, I include A.A. Markov's development of the Markov chain model and related theory as third on my OR/MS best list. This model pervades our analysis of stochastic systems, and is the foundation for more complex models that we manipulate in hopes of matching the characteristics of ever more practical systems.

While the development of the Markov chain mainly existed as a mathematical exercise at first, queueing theory, my fourth best of OR/MS choice, began as A. Erlang's application to the telephone industry. Since that early 20th century work on waiting times, we have seen numerous advances including our best-known formula, Little's Law. This basic concept is now familiar to communities from assembly line operators to webmasters. E-commerce's explosion makes queueing even more significant for our 21st century development.

Finally, I conclude my list of the five most significant OR/MS achievements of the past millennium with George Dantzig's creation of linear programming. This development has appeared on other lists (as Tom Magnanti noted in the last issue), but has been singularly important for OR/MS professionals in providing both a framework for modeling decisions and a mechanism for finding solutions. The foundation of optimization methods begins with linear programming, even though our models now routinely include many nonlinear forms.

From the past thousand years, I then have the calculus of optimization, scientific management, Markov chains, queueing theory and linear programming as five of the 10 most significant achievements in OR/MS. I can think of several other developments that merit consideration but would like your participation in picking those. Please check INFORMS On-Line to express your views. If you have thoughts about creations for the next millennium, please send those too. I look forward to receiving your ideas.

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