Dr. Magnanti is the new President of INFORMS. The operations researcher began his term on January 1.
"Tom has set an example as an operations researcher and as an engineer," said Professor Karla Hoffman, Past President of the 12,000-member association and chair of the operations research department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. "We're proud that his work and his field have been singled out for what may be the most prestigious academic engineering position in the world."
"Dr. Magnanti's appointment affirms the central and critical role of operations research in our world today," said his colleague Dr. Richard C. Larson, an operations researcher and professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT.
"Now the Dean of one of the world's most revered schools of engineering is not a mechanical or civil or electrical engineer but rather a "decision engineer." He is a highly acclaimed professional who invents operations research methodologies and applies them to improve decision making and resource allocation in all of these traditional engineering fields and in many other fields as well. Engineering today is very much about decision making and innovative use of information. OR is at the center of that new focus of our expanding information-based economy."
Origins in World War II
Started in WW II as part of the war effort for locating expensive and scarce radar facilities as well as for tracking enemy submarines, operations research blossomed in the 1950's in both the private and public sectors. OR uses all available techniques of the scientific methods to help solve business and governmental problems. Paradoxically, OR uses math but is not math. OR uses computers but is not computer science. OR uses statistics but is not statistics. OR uses a lot of common sense, as well as advanced computer-implemented models and algorithms.
Today the operations research approach is present in virtually every major line of business and government work. Among its major successes are revenue management systems at airlines that allow affordable travel to families, as well as reliable service to business travelers; logistics systems for transporting goods and parcels efficiently world wide; financial engineering that maximizes gains from investment portfolios subject to prudent risk taking; and important contributions in the public sector ranging from the deployment of urban emergency services to strategies for managing organ donor programs.
Studied with Founder of the Field
Dr. Magnanti, 53, has been co-director of the Operations Research Center at MIT since 1986. He joined MIT in 1971 as an assistant professor at the Sloan School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. in operations research in 1972 from Stanford University, where he studied with one of the founders of the field, George Dantzig.
Dr. Magnanti devotes his time to education that combines engineering and management and to research on large-scale optimization. He has studied telecommunication systems, production planning and scheduling, transportation planning, facility location, logistics, and network design. He is co-author of two textbooks, "Applied Mathematical Programming" (Addison-Wesley, 1977) and "Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms and Applications" (Prentice Hall, 1993).
Dr. Magnanti has been a research fellow at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics at the University of Louvain in Belgium and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School. He has also spent sabbatical leaves at GTE Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Sabre Technology Solutions. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Magnanti has received numerous INFORMS honors including the Lanchester Prize and the Kimball Medal from the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), one of two associations that merged to create INFORMS. He also received the Gordon Y. Billiard Award for distinguished service to MIT. He is a former president of ORSA and former editor of Operations Research, an INFORMS journal.
He has received honorary degrees from the University of Montreal, Linköping University of Sweden, and the University of Louvain.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.