The Memorial Tribute to the Great Hani Mahmassani at INFORMS

All those who had the pleasure of knowing Hani Mahmassani, who passed away on July 15, 2025 at the age of 69, will never forget him. He has left us with an incredible void, but lucky are we who were his friends, and/or his students,  and/or colleagues, or collaborators.

Many thanks to Yue Wang of the University of Arizona, who prepared this poster notice for the  Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society memorial tribute event in honor of Hani Mahmassani that took place last week at the INFORMS Conference in Atlanta.

The session began with a Zoom presentation by Roberto Roberti of Italy, this year's recipient of the Stella Dafermos Mid-Career Award, and then it was time for our panel, which was chaired by Karen Smilowitz of Northwestern University, a colleague of Hani's.

At the beginning, we gathered for a photo with Pat Mokhtarian, of Georgia Tech, who joined us. Pat was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, as Hani had been earlier.

Srinivas Peeta of Georgia Tech had prepared the nice collage poster of photos that some of us had also contributed to.

The talks were incredibly touching with Srinivas Peeta speaking about Hani, as his PhD advisor, and colleague, with numerous photos over the years of many luminaries in transportation science. He emphasized what a great researcher Hani was and also an outstanding organizer, integrator, and mentor. 

In my presentation, which is available here:  https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/Hani-Tribute-INFORMS-Nagurney.pdf, I included photos taken over many years of activities, including service ones, I had engaged in with Hani. So many memories came flooding back and I can hear his voice. Hani always inspired us to reach higher and to do more. He stretched us professionally and personally with his many kindnesses and support.

Marco Nie, a colleague of Hani's at Northwestern, had used ChatGPT for his presentation slides, and it was fascinating to see what was picked up by AI in terms of the contributions of Hani's research to transportation science, such as his work on bounded rationality and traffic assignment, and dynamic traffic network equilibrium.

Mike Hyland of UC Irvine, and a former PhD student of Hani's, spoke from the heart about how it was to work with Hani, who only slept a few hours a night. Hani was always willing to listen and to push the frontiers of transportation research and practice. He supervised over 75 PhD theses. 

We then took the group photo below. Thanks to all who were able to join us for this touching memorial session in honor of Hani Mahmassani. 

Thank you, Hani, for your friendship, scholarship, leadership, and for being a visionary.

For the In Memoriam, co-authored by Karen Smilowitz and Marco Nie, and published in the journal Transportation Science, see here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/trsc.2025.memorial.v59.n6

The In Memoriam ends as follows: "In 1997, Hani wrote a tribute to Robert Herman in Transportation Science. He closed his tribute with the following words that ring so true to us as we remember Hani: “I will miss him, and so will many others, but will always know that I am a richer person for having known him.”"

Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics

On January 29, 2010, the Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics will take place at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. This symposium has been organized by Professors David E. Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani to honor and celebrate the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann to Northwestern. The symposium program is now available.

Professor Beckmann is the only living author of the classic book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, published in 1956 by Yale University Press, and co-authored with Bart McGuire and Chris Winsten. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of this classic book, in 2005, we organized several sessions at the San Francisco INFORMS meeting and both Beckmann, and McGuire (who died two months after), came to the sessions and took part in the festivities. Please click here for those talks and many photos as well as for a link to the classic book, which is now available online.

Professor Beckmann was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, which was chaired by Professor Stella Dafermos, and I remember so well the question that he asked after my defense plus the party that I gave in Barus and Holley (that well-known engineering and physics building at Brown) afterwards. Beckmann, a true cosmopolitan and lover of travel and terrific food, especially enjoyed the European tortes that I had prepared for the occasion (although we were quite poor grad students at that time and did not have all the right utensils for slicing). He took advantage of a plastic spatula to do the job.

Professor Beckmann, I hear, will be traveling by train to Northwestern, from Providence, Rhode Island, and the day before the symposium, will be speaking on his reflections of the classic book (BMW).

Boyce, Mahmassani, and I wrote a journal article on the impacts of BMW, which was published in Papers in Regional Science in 2005 .

At Northwestern, I will be speaking on some of my latest work and will be delivering the paper, Supply Chain Network Design Under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition.

I am very much looking forward to this symposium, which will honor the work of a truly great scholar and human being.

For those who would like to see additional photos of Professor Beckmann, who, as Professor Boyce, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, please click here. These photos were taken in various locations around the globe, including Australia and Sweden.