George Bernard Dantzig was an American mathematical scientist who made contributions to industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics.
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
Richard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
David Gale was an American mathematician and economist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the departments of mathematics, economics, and industrial engineering and operations research. He has contributed to the fields of mathematical economics, game theory, and convex analysis.
John Emory Dennis, Jr. is an American mathematician who has made major contributions in mathematical optimization. Dennis is currently a Noah Harding professor emeritus and research professor in the department of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research interests include optimization in engineering design. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Optimization. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.
Margaret H. Wright is an American computer scientist and mathematician. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, with research interests in optimization, linear algebra, and scientific computing. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for development of numerical optimization algorithms and for leadership in the applied mathematics community. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. She was the first woman to serve as President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Ellis Lane Johnson is the Professor Emeritus and the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
Fred Glover is Chief Scientific Officer of Entanglement, Inc., USA, in charge of algorithmic design and strategic planning for applications of combinatorial optimization in quantum computing. He also holds the title of Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, associated with the College of Engineering and Applied Science and the Leeds School of Business. He is known for his innovations in the area of metaheuristics including the computer-based optimization methodology of Tabu search an adaptive memory programming algorithm for mathematical optimization, and the associated evolutionary Scatter Search and Path Relinking algorithms.
Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2012–2015) and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies (2005–2017) at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.
Eugene Leighton (Gene) Lawler was an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
William John Cook is an American operations researcher and mathematician, and Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.
Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and control theorist. He is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor in Electrical Engineering, and professor by courtesy in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He is also affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME).
James Robert Thompson was an American mathematician, statistician, and university professor whose most influential work combined applied mathematics and nonparametric statistics with computing technologies to advance the fields of financial engineering and computational finance, model disease progression, assess problems in public health, and optimize quality control in industrial manufacturing.
David Simchi-Levi is an American academic working as a Professor of Engineering Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the founder or co-founder of several companies. Simchi-Levi's research focuses on supply chain management, revenue management, and business analytics.
Collette René Coullard is an American mathematician, industrial engineer, operations researcher, and matroid theorist known for her research on combinatorial optimization problems that combine facility location and stock management. Formerly a professor at Purdue University, the University of Waterloo, Northwestern University, and Lake Superior State University, she has retired to become a professor emeritus.
Paolo Toth is an Italian scientist and engineer, and an Emeritus Professor of Operations Research at the University of Bologna. He is known for his research in operations research and mathematical programming. He made significant contributions in the areas of vehicle routing, knapsack and other cutting and packing problems, train scheduling, set covering, vertex coloring and, in general, combinatorial optimization. As of 2023, he published over 170 peer-reviewed articles and was cited more than 10,000 times.
Robert L. Smith is an American engineer, academic and author. He is the Altarum/ERIM Russell D. O’Neal Professor Emeritus in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
