The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

Hello, all. This is the first article on The Operations Research / Management Sciences Blog (The ORMS Blog). My name is Suri Like. I am a recent university graduate who is passionate about the world of Operations Research / Management Sciences (ORMS). In fact currently I am applying for graduate programs in related areas. Since the terms Operations Research and Management Sciences are interchangeable under most circumstances, I will simply use the abbreviation “OR” in most of my writings.

In a recent article on OR/MS Today, the author interviewed the INFORMS President-Elect Cynthia Barnhart, who described two major challenges for OR educators and professionals today, which are essentially:

1. Getting more young people to learn about OR so that the OR community will have a continuously increasing supply of new minds.
2. Getting more people in governments and business to learn about the benefits that OR can bring to their organizations.

The collective O.R. profession has for decades decried the public’s lack of recognition for O.R.’s “hidden” contributions to society (not to mention the fact that INFORMS spent something like $1 million in recent years promoting the profession through its “Science of Better” (SoB) marketing campaign).

I know that a personal blog like this is far from being a good marketing tool for OR, but I will keep these two mission statements in mind and as the guidance to the direction where this site is going. This blog will be a place where I write and post articles related to OR. Most of the articles will be my personal reviews of other OR articles (such as scholarly articles, news articles and even posts from other blogs). I will try to update this blog regularly and cover thoroughly different aspects of OR including its history, research, education, applications and future prospects to inform people who are already in the OR community about the latest innovations in the field and also introduce OR to people who have no idea what it is.

Reference
“Doing Good with Good O.R.” by Peter Horner, OR/MS Today, Dec 2007