Engineering Memory of the Month

Operations Research joins Stanford Engineering

Operations researchers look at the patterns of real-life situations — traffic, supply chains, conflict resolution, decision making — and they abstract out the mathematics in hopes of finding optimal solutions. There is a proud tradition of operations research (OR) in engineering. At Stanford, that started 40 years ago.

Beginning in the 1967–1968 school year, the School of Engineering became the home of the Department of Operations Research (now part of the Department of Management Science and Engineering). For five years before it became an engineering department, OR had existed as an interdepartmental program, so when it joined Stanford Engineering it brought nine faculty and 50 doctoral students into the school’s fold.

The faculty are pictured, and include some of the greatest professors the school has known. Kenneth Arrow, second from the right, won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics, for example. The inaugural faculty (from left) were George Dantzig, Alan Manne, Frederick Hillier, Donald Iglehart, Arthur Veinott, Rudolf Kalman, Gerald Lieberman, Arrow, and Richard Cottle.

We are interested in your nostalgic photos and the stories they tell. If you’d like to share them with the Stanford Engineering community, e-mail them to David Orenstein , Manager, Communications and P.R.