New Year -- Teaching New Courses at the Isenberg School

I have enjoyed this break not only because it is such a special time of the year but because I have had time to prepare two new courses that I will be teaching this 2012 term at the Isenberg School of Management.

Getting a syllabus together (as well as the course materials and lectures) requires a lot of planning and work and with this task accomplished for both my "Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare" course and my "Advanced Mathematical Programming: Dynamic Network Systems" course, I have even managed to get several lectures together that I am very excited about.

I wrote an earlier post on the Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course and the syllabus for this course is now available online.

The Dynamic Network Systems course will be covering projected dynamical systems, some evolutionary variational inequalities, and applications ranging from dynamic transportation networks to complex supply chains and models of the Internet. We will be reading and discussing many journal articles and it will be an exciting and challenging course. What I find truly fascinating is how the methodology that we developed (along with Dupuis, Zhang, and others) has now broken through other disciplines and has generated additional interesting results and applications to population games in economics, predator-prey networks in ecology, and even neural networks and neuroscience, to start. I love it when applications drive innovations in methodologies and vice versa.

I will make available to the students in this course two of my books: Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, the second and revised edition, published in 1999, and Projected Dynamical Systems and Variational Inequalities with Applications, written with Ding Zhang, and published in 1996. The latter book is the second book in the International Series in Operations Research and Management Science, edited by Fred S. Hillier. In addition, I will be making use of Patrizia Daniele's book, Dynamic Networks and Evolutionary Variational Inequalities, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2006. Patrizia wrote this book while she was a Visiting Scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University while I was a Science Fellow there in 2005-2006 and we collaborated. I wrote my Supply Chain Network Economics book that year that was published by Edward Elgar Publishing in the New Dimension in Networks series.

The syllabus for the Dynamic Network Systems course is now available online.