John Nash's Last Book and the Operations Research Connections via Greece

Our terrific Dynamics of Disasters conference, which took place in Kalamata, Greece, in now over. It was such a pleasure working on this conference with my fellow co-organizers, Professor Panos M. Pardalos and Professor Ilias Kotsireas.

While there, I learned of some quite surprising news,which further supports the small world hypothesis (at least when it comes to our terrfic operations research community).

While at one of our nice get-togethers at the conference (I have posted many photos on the blog in previous posts), we reinisced about John Nash, the Nobel laureate, who tragically died in a taxi crash in New Jersey, along with his wife, after returning from Oslo, Norway, where he was honored with the Abel Prize. I wrote about receiving this shocking news while in Gothenburg, Sweden. 

John Nash greatly influenced so much of my work in competitive supply chains and game theory and he is also referenced many times in the book that I am presently writing.

Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, who is renowned in operations research, told me at one of our get-togethers in Kalamata that he commissioned John Nash's last book for Springer.

The book, "Open Problems in Mathematics," is co-edited by Michael Rassias and John Nash. In fact, Princeton University, in its many tributes to Nash, mentioned the book and this article contains a photo of Rassias with Nash.  Rassias speaks eloquently of the kindness of Nash and how he plans to emulate him. Rassias and Nash had just completed the foreword to their book before Nash left for Oslo. According to the Princeton tribute:

They agreed upon a quote from Albert Einstein that resonated with Nash (although Nash pointed out that Einstein was a physicist, not a mathematician, Rassias said): "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."

Professor Ilias Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada (who worked tirelessly in making our conference a success) shared with me  the photo below of him with John Nash and with Professor Stephen M. Watt, currently the Dean of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Nash was one of 4 invited speakers at the ECCAD 2008 conference at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, WV., at which the above photo was taken.

Keeping with the small world theme of this post, Michael Rassias, who is a postdoc fellow at Princeton University, is the son of Professor Themistocles M. Rassias, who was a co-organizer of the conference in Athens, Greece, in the summer of 2013 on Network Models in Economics and Finance at which I was a plenary speaker.

That conference banquet took place at the magnificent "new" Acropolis museum, with a view of the Parthenon; see photo below. Pardalos was also a co-organizer of that conference.

Our paper, "A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability," A. Nagurney, L.S. Nagurney, and S. Shukla, will appear in the volume, Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security, which is co-edited by N. J. Daras and  M. Th. Rassias, and is in press with Springer.

And, would you believe, that a contributor to the volume of Nash's last book is Professor Stephen Miller of Williams College,  who is married to my Marketing colleague at the Isenberg School of Management, Professor Liz Miller!

Head of the Charles Regatta -- The Largest Regatta in the World

Boston is a great sports town and yesterday was an amazing day for sports fans -- not only did the Red Sox win their baseball game and made it into the World Series, so many of my students will be very happy this week, but it was also the first day of the two-day Head of the Charles Regatta, which brought an estimated 300,000 rowers, friends, and spectators to the Cambridge/Boston area.

Competitors came from 19 different countries and there were so many colleges and universities represented. This was my second Head of the Charles regatta -- when I was on sabbatical at Harvard in 2005-2006 as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, I watched from the Cambridge side.

But, yesterday, we watched from the Allston bank of the Charles River and the competitors ranged in age from 14 - 85 years of age. Interestingly, at the INFORMS Conference in Minneapolis, October 6-9, 2013, I attended many business meetings and other events and at a Fora breakfast meeting, a faculty member from Drexel University sat next to me. I took one look at him and asked him whether he had been a rower. Amazingly, he had started rowing while in high school, and had gone to the Head of The Charles -- his boat beat Princeton and Harvard and everyone in his boat got recruited by the Ivy League. He rowed for Princeton and majored in architecture -- so he was learning about operations research and analytics.

My college room-mate at Brown University was on the women's crew (and an Applied Math major, no less) and now my daughter is on a crew team so that was why we were in Cambridge yesterday,

It was fabulous to see so many competitors and colleges represented from across the US!

I even saw several members of the UMass Amherst women's crew team and several of my daughter's friends from her elementary school, The Bement School, and high school, Deerfield Academy, who are on various college crew teams, were also there. Other friends came to watch from various vantage points.

Given what happened at our Boston Marathon  last April 15, there was a lot of police presence and I spoke to several officials about the heightened security.

We even saw the men's Olympic Gold medalist from Auckland, New Zealand, in an event after the Women's Collegiate 4s zip by several boats.

I love the team aspect of this sport from the rowers working in unison to the  coxswains, who are the "persons in charge of the boat, particularly its navigation and steering." They are those with the loud voices and more compact sizes. It is great to see female coxswains directing males in boats. Future, CEOs. I suspect.

We stood with fans supporting many different colleges and universities and saw boats from Bowdoin, Trinity, West Point, Clemson University, the Coast Guard Academy, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, University of Florida, Bryant University, Lafayette College, Vanderbilt, Washington University, Texas A&M, University of Chicago, Vassar, McGill University, Wheaton College, Hamilton College, Wesleyan University, Amherst College, Barry University (which won), and many other schools compete. Several course records were broken.

It was great to see the smiles on the rowers' faces after they competed in a truly special sporting event.

The logistics behind the organization of this event were incredible and the rowers had to row about 3 miles from their launches before starting their 3 mile races. Crew members are super physically fit.

The souvenir stands were fun, too.

Congrats to the organizers of The Head of the Charles for a great event and to all the competitors and coaches, of course!

All the results can be found here.

And for those who were selected to be volunteers (it seems that IT skills were in demand), for 3 hours of work, you got the gorgeous Brooks Brothers jacket, valued at $250 (one of my daughter's friends received one).

 

Fortune 500 Companies Should Learn from the Ivy League and Have More Female CEOs

CNNMoney is celebrating that Fortune 500 women CEOs hit a milestone in that, as of January 1, 2013, there are now 21 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies with recent female leaders heading up such high tech firms as Lockheed Martin, HP, Yahoo, and IBM and even General Dynamics.

Alright, so the fact that 21 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are now females is certainly reason to celebrate but this is still a measly 4.2%. And it is certainly terrific that there are now 20 female Senators in the US Congress.

Now, let's look at the Ivy League colleges -- that is where the representation at the top -- at the Presidential level -- reflects more the population at large in terms of gender and we should be celebrating that.

As we start off the New 2013 Year,  5 our of the 8 Ivy League universities are being led by females.

My alma mater, Brown University, has as its new President, Dr. Christina Paxson, who, just a few months ago, took over the Presidency of brown after the long leadership of Dr. Ruth Simmons. Very cool that Brown picked another female President!

Harvard University, also my alma mater since I was a Radcliffe Fellow, has at its helm, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, whom I have also blogged about. She was the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study while I was a Fellow there and took over after Dr. Larry Summers stepped down from the Presidency of Harvard.

Princeton University is still being led by Dr. Shirley Tilghman, but she will be stepping down soon -- will Princeton select another female is its new President?


Dr. Amy Gutmann has been the President of UPenn since 2004 and has done wonderful things for this Ivy League institution.

And Dr. Carol Folt is now the Interim President at Dartmouth College. She has this position until Dr. Philip Hanlon (male) assumes the Presidency of Dartmouth soon.  I have blogged about him since he is a mathematician and we have an intellectual connection since his dissertation advisor at CalTech was Dr. Olga Taussky-Todd and I used one of her theorems in my doctoral dissertation.

Columbia University, Yale University, and Cornell University, which complete the roster of eight Ivy League universities, are led by males and, as far as I know, have always had male Presidents. The incoming President of Yale will be male. Dr. Peter Salovey, Yale's Provost,  will replace Dr. Richard C. Levin who is stepping down.

So, for the here and now, we should celebrate that, when noone was paying attention, now the majority of Ivy League universities -- among the elite institutions  of higher education in the world -- are now being led by females!

Fortune 500 companies -- take notice!

New President of Brown University Announced -- Dr. Christina Paxson

I tend to have uncanny intuition and, between working on lectures that I will later this month be delivering in Sweden, checked out the Brown University homepage. I have 4 degrees from Brown so I do have a great fondness for this university. Plus, my husband has two degrees from Brown and I met him there, freshman week, no less.

The new President of Brown University has been announced and it is a female (following in the footsteps of Dr. Ruth Simmons who is stepping down after her fabulous presidency later this term).

The new President of Brown University is Dr. Christina Hull Paxson, an economist. She is currently the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University. She will assume the Presidency of Brown on July 1, 2012.

According to the Brown University press release:

A 1982 honors graduate of Swarthmore College, Phi Beta Kappa, Paxson earned her graduate degrees in economics at Columbia University (M.A., 1985; Ph.D., 1987). She began her academic career at Princeton University in 1986, becoming assistant professor of economics and public affairs the next year. She became a full professor in 1997 and was named the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics and Public Affairs in 2007. Graduate students at the Woodrow Wilson School have given her five annual awards for teaching excellence.

Congratulations to Dr. Paxson -- I wish her well!

Why Teaching is Essential According to the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman via Mick Trick and Scenes of Princeton

The new academic year is approaching and there is a sparkle in the air.

During the summer, academics are engaged in many activities but they do most of their teaching during the school year.

Professor Mike Trick of CMU, a fellow blogger in OR, has a fabulous post on the meaning of teaching by none other than Professor Richard Feynman, the renowned Nobel Laureate in physics, whose books are a must read, including his Surely, you must be joking, Mr. Feynman!

My favorite part of the riposte, with which I fully concur, is: The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.

You may read Mike Trick's full post here with longer quotes from Feynman. It certainly will put educators in a spirit for tackling all the surprises and new experiences that each new academic year brings. Thanks, Mike, and thank you, Richard Feynman, now in the heavens!

And since Richard Feynman, in his piece on reflections on teaching, is musing about his time at Princeton in the 1940s, above, I have posted photos of Princeton University, which we recently visited on another college trip chaining tour. The dark classroom above is where Einstein (another physicist who needs no introduction) lectured and where the information session took place. Our tour guide was fabulous and was originally from central Massachusetts and attended a public high school.

For more on summer college tours, you can read the article in The New York Times, after which my comment appears, followed by a comment from none other than Dr. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the former President of both the University of Hartford and George Washington University, who did wonderful things for both of these academic institutions.