Re:Industrial Mathematics
by olympus on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @09:42AM
(#5213249)
It's nice to see OR get some love on HN. I think one of the biggest problems with OR practitioners is that we have a hard time articulating what we bring to the table. My job title is "suitability analyst," but that doesn't tell the whole picture. We have slogans like "The Science of Better," but most people still don't understand what we do. OR is overshadowed by larger but not necessarily better "brands" like systems engineering and MBAs spouting words like "lean." I can't tell people that I do OR because people ask "what's that?" and don't have time for me to give them a five minute explanation. I might just point them to this page and say if you really want to know then read this. Otherwise just go ahead and think of me as an industrial engineer/computer scientist/mathematician/statistician/economist all rolled into one.
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When people ask me what OR is, I say it's "mathematical modeling and computer simulation" or "system analysis and optimization" or just "optimization".
Good resource for OR fellows to fish for some nice examples and descriptions:
Great link, I was about to post it myself.
At a graduation ceremony a couple of years ago, the chair of the OR department at Cornell said that OR is "the math, modeling, computer science and engineering of making decisions in often uncertain environments." I'm paraphrasing, but I thought that was a pretty good definition.
I love having studied OR; I would love for it to have more name recognition so that it wouldn't be so hard to explain!
As a graduating student in this field of "industrial_engineer/computer_scientist/mathematician/statistician/economist" I found this story and the rest of the site (not the front page picture) fairly inspiring. There are no role models even with the decent amount of blogging the OR/MS community does. They are still stuffy academicians, perhaps so because they could not find role models in industry either.
If you want an excellent OR role model, I suggest you check out Gene Woolsey. He has a book that is a collection of stories of real world OR, not just solving traveling salesmen problems: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html He's an excellent example of a non-stuffy academic that focuses on applying OR to the real world.
Theres a guy, Marc Kuo, in Vancouver, Canada who founded/co-founded an OR-based startup: http://www.routific.com/
Thanks for that link. It also did remind me of one Australian company [http://www.biarri.com/about_the_team.shtml] that I explore from time to time. They seem to offer the most types of OR decision support for business, even with SaaS delivery.