报道 | 斯坦福运筹学辉煌67年历史见证人的自述

Frederick S. Hillier在华盛顿州阿伯丁出生和长大，在高中时表现出色，在全州范围的论文写作、数学、音乐和辩论比赛中获奖无数。希利尔在斯坦福大学攻读本科时继续取得成就，他在 300 多名学生的工程班中排名第一。随后，他留在斯坦福大学攻读研究生，师从杰拉尔德·J·利伯曼( Gerald J. Lieberman)。Hillier 于 1961 年获得博士学位，获得博士学位后，他留在母校任教，28 岁获得终身教职，32 岁获得正教授职称。他还曾在康奈尔大学、卡内基梅隆大学、丹麦技术大学、坎特伯雷大学和剑桥大学担任访问学者。在斯坦福大学任教 35 年后，他于 1996 年提前退休，专心从事教科书写作，现在他是斯坦福大学运筹学名誉教授。

Hillier 博士所获荣誉不计其数，他发表了广泛的论文，他的开创性论文至少 10 次被选作再版。他是美国管理科学研究所（TIMS）和美国海军研究办公室主办的“相关项目的资本预算”研究竞赛的一等奖获得者。他和 Lieberman 博士还获得了 1995 年 Lanchester 奖（运筹学领域任何类型的最佳英文出版物）的荣誉奖，本书第 6 版获得运筹学与管理科学研究所 (INFORMS) 颁发的奖项。此外，他还凭借本书第 8 版获得了享有盛誉的 2004 年 INFORMS 说明文写作奖。Hillier 博士也在其所在领域的专业协会担任过许多领导职务。他曾担任 ORSA 财务主管、TIMS 会议副主席、TIMS 出版委员会主席以及 ORSA/TIMS 联合会议委员会主席。他与后者的合作促成了 1995 年两个学会的最终合并。从 1993 年开始一直持续到 2013 年，Hillier 是 Kluwer Academic 和 Springer 出版的国际运筹学和管理科学系列的创始系列编辑。

Hillier 博士是近几十年来斯坦福大学最杰出的领导人之一。在主持运筹学系后，他曾担任人文与科学学院副院长、副教务长兼研究主任、副教务长兼研究生院院长、教务委员会主席、大学顾问委员会成员，以及百年庆典委员会主席。他还曾在三位不同的斯坦福大学校长手下担任教务长或代理教务长。在这些年的大学领导中，他也保持着自己专业领域的活跃。他的研究兴趣在于运筹学的随机领域，通常包括应用概率和统计。他在可靠性和质量控制领域以及在资源有限时复杂系统的建模（包括其优化设计）方面发表了大量文章。

Over the last 67 years, I have had the great privilege of both observing and participating in the glorious history of operations research (O.R.) at Stanford University. Sharing this journey with numerous gifted colleagues and students has been a wonderful experience. I record below the highlights of this journey.

When I arrived at Stanford as a freshman in September 1954, operations research was still a very young field. Only the most progressive universities were beginning to introduce O.R. into their curriculum – Stanford was one of them. A new course, Introduction to Operations Research, was being offered in the Department of Industrial Engineering (IE). This particularly interested me because I was planning to major in IE, and this was exactly the kind of course I wanted to take. It was to be taught by Gerald (Jerry) Lieberman, a new assistant professor with a joint appointment in industrial engineering and statistics. A little later, Harvey Wagner also joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor, and he occasionally taught this course. (Both Lieberman and Wagner went on to become prominent members of the international O.R. community and INFORMS.)

During this time period, there were other Stanford faculty members who were starting to teach O.R.-related courses, including Kenneth Arrow (mathematical economics), Samuel Karlin (stochastic processes and applied probability) and Herbert Scarf (inventory theory). These three individuals then jointly conducted foundational research on the mathematical theory of inventory and production. Their results are still used today.

With the growing prominence of operations research, Stanford was ready to make a big push in this area. An Interdepartmental Program in Operations Research began to offer a Ph.D. in operations research in September 1962. Jerry Lieberman became the chairman of the program. In addition to Jerry, the faculty consisted of a number of other prominent Stanford professors who had appointments in closely related departments and were teaching the courses needed for this program. Harvey Wagner was a particularly active member of the program before leaving Stanford in 1967.

Some junior faculty needed to be hired to help support this program. With my research and teaching interests in queueing theory, integer programming, risk analysis in capital budgeting, etc., I was the first to be hired upon the completion of my Ph.D. in 1961. Arthur (Pete) Veinott (inventory theory, dynamic programming and lattice programming) arrived a year later. (Both of our appointments were in the IE department.) Within a few more years, Donald Iglehart (applied probability and simulation) and Richard Cottle (mathematical programming) joined the staff.

All four of these junior faculty members were destined to become core members of the Stanford O.R. program throughout the next few decades as they gained increasing prominence in the field. All four became INFORMS Fellows and winners of other major awards from INFORMS. (Started in 2002, INFORMS Fellows are a highly selective group of INFORMS members who have been awarded this honor because of their outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences.)

An especially important move during this period was adding George Dantzig, the renowned “Father of Linear Programming,” to the faculty in 1966, who went on to have a huge impact on the O.R. program.

Stanford’s Interdepartmental Program in Operations Research proved to be a great success, with many outstanding Ph.D. graduates who became major contributors to the field. Therefore, in 1967, this program was converted into a full-fledged Department of Operations Research in the School of Engineering that also would offer an M.S. degree in O.R. and a small number of undergraduate courses. Lieberman continued as the chairman until 1975. He was a natural academic leader and so then moved on to senior administrative positions, including serving as the acting provost or provost under three different Stanford presidents.

Another notable event in 1967 was the publication of the first edition of the “Introduction to Operations Research” textbook, coauthored by me and Lieberman, which became the preeminent textbook on this topic through a total of 11 editions (including one last year). (See a companion article in the June 2021 issue of OR/MS Today for this story [1].)

With Dantzig joining the faculty, everything was in place for the Stanford Department of Operations Research to enter a golden age. In addition to his research and teaching, Dantzig made a great impact by bringing in a large number of outstanding researchers to complement our program. Using his research funds, he founded the Systems Optimization Laboratory and hired outstanding computer scientists such as Michael Saunders, Walter Murray, Margaret Wright, Philip Gill and John Tomlin to do research in scientific computing and develop O.R. software packages. Dantzig established and led the Energy Modeling Forum; John Weyant was (and still is) a leader in that activity. Others arrived to work with Dantzig in other areas, including Gerd Infanger in the stochastic programming area. Dantzig also supervised many outstanding Ph.D. students, with many impactful research papers (and even a few books) ensuing from his group.

The outstanding contributors to the O.R. program in the initial decades after Dantzig’s arrival extended well beyond George and his collaborators mentioned above. The four junior faculty from the 1960s had become highly productive members of the field. Along with Lieberman, two outstanding mathematical economists, Alan Manne and Arrow (who won a Nobel Prize in 1972) were also founding members of the department. Rudolf Kalman was another founding member, but he left Stanford in 1971. Somewhat later, the department hired two younger faculty – Curtis Eaves and Peter Glynn – who became important longtime members of the department. (Eaves has retired, but Glynn is still a very productive Stanford faculty member who served several years as chairman of the Department of Management Science and Engineering.)

The Department of Operations Research proved to be a real magnet for outstanding students wanting to enter the field. For many years, at least half of the National Science Foundation Fellowship winners going into O.R. each year chose to enter the Stanford Ph.D. program. Those Ph.D. graduates generally went on to become prominent members of the field. Many won the prestigious Fellow Award from INFORMS. Many became deans or senior faculty at top O.R. programs or became prominent practitioners. Many also provided important service to INFORMS and its predecessors.

The department also attracted several dozen students each year for the one-year program leading to an M.S. in operations research. Some of these students were either employees of Bell Labs or members of the military who were sent to Stanford for further education. Additionally, Stanford offered several undergraduate O.R. courses, including a two-quarter sequence that introduced O.R. (using the Hillier-Lieberman textbook) that was largely taken by students majoring in IE. Enrollment ranged as high as 190. A similar two-quarter sequence with a little more mathematical content was also offered to students in the popular undergraduate major of mathematical and computational sciences.

I introduced an undergraduate course entitled “Models and Applications of Operations Research in Society” (although the faculty privately referred to it as our “O.R. for Poets” course). It had no mathematical prerequisites and was aimed at students in the humanities and social sciences to introduce them to the powerful impact that O.R. could have when addressing societal issues. This course was quite successful, drawing up to 45 students, but was eventually dropped.