Marking the 30th Anniversary of the Passing of Dr. Stella Dafermos, the Second Female PhD in Operations Research in the World

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are hearing from relatives and friends, from far and wide, offering support during these extremely challenging times.

Last week, I heard from my Brown University room-mate, with whom I shared a dorm room for 2 years. She was also a fellow Applied Math major, with a love of Operations Research, and an exceptional ballerina from South America, who then became a member of Brown's women's crew team. I co-founded the Brown Women's track team.

My room-mate wrote to me: "Stella Dafermos has appeared on my horizon these days. I can see Stella, wearing her grey knitted vest, writing on the blackboard, remember? It may well be that we’re living one of those math models she was trying to explain back then."

And then in a follow-up message last week, she continued: "I have a memory, crystal clear in my mind’s eye: we were sophomores, we were in our room (4th floor Diman), I am looking at my notes from her latest class, literally turning the notebook upside down and sideways to see if any of it would make any sense, thinking I really don’t think this is for me..  you were changing into your running clothes, munching on an apple, you come over, eye the notes and say.. oh, yeah, there it is, that’s good! You’ll get it!   And off you go running. I didn’t get it, but later, much, much later, from Vedic texts where they teach how our reality is actualized out of infinite probabilities, well, now the value of those lessons is evident."

Interestingly, unlike my room-mate, I never had Stella while I was an undergraduate student at Brown but I would hear about her from other female Applied Math majors. 

Dr. Stella Dafermos, the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research (OR), passed away on April 5, 1990, so we now mark the 30th anniversary of her passing.  She was the only female Professor in the Divisions of Applied Math and Engineering at Brown at that time, and I became her first PhD student. Although she passed away at the age of 49, her incredible legacy on contributions to transportation and networks, notably, continues. Her contributions were recognized in an obituary that I wrote for the journal Operations Research, the only female thus honored. Her PhD was from Johns Hopkins University in 1968, and she was surrounded by luminaries in OR there.

Below is the academic genealogy tree, with academic ancestors including Maxwell, Newton, and Galileo. It, in an expanded form, with my PhD students, hangs in my office for inspiration. You can see the list of my PhD students, with the latest, Deniz Besik, to be added soon, here.

And, in a very interesting blogpost by the esteemed Dr. Mike Trick, who happens to be not only a fellow Canadian by birth, but also my academic cousin, you can read more.

Stella passed away on a Thursday. I was that year a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School of MIT, and, shortly after I received the phone call about her death, I gave a talk at the OR Center. Such resilience is needed now, more than ever. I recall Professor Jim Orlin coming to my office to support me. Interestingly, Dr. Les Servi, now of MITRE (and with whom I also corresponded this week), was on sabbatical at the Sloan School then, and also offered much appreciated support. 

My husband drove us to the funeral, which was on the following Saturday. I remember the daffodils at the cemetery on beautiful Blackstone Boulevard and also some snow falling. I always consider daffodils to be Stella's flower because of her surname "Dafermos."  I wrote a tribute to my "Academic Mother" here.  I also wrote a bit on my personal journey in another post, in which I recognised the 20th anniversary of her passing.

One of Stella's paper (on variational inequalities, of course) is among the most impactful ones published in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science in 50 years!

Professor Alan J. Goldman, Operations Researcher Passes

Dr. Alan J. Goldman died a few days ago. He was well-known in operations research for his fundamental contributions and for his support of many researchers in this field, going back to his days at the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he worked for over twenty years. Afterwards, he was a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences (now called the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he served on the faculty for over thirty years, including as an emeritus professor.

Dr. Goldman was elected into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1989.

The Johns Hopkins University newspaper published a very nice obituary on Professor Goldman. The article has an elegant way of summarizing the discipline of operations research as: the use of mathematics to improve decisions on the design and operation of complex systems.

My doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown University was Professor Stella Dafermos, who, interestingly, received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. She was the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research in the world. I was invited, upon her untimely death at age 49, to write her obituary for the top journal, Operations Research, when she died in April 1990. Hard to believe that almost 20 years have passed since her death. As an aside, I might add that all of her four doctoral students have now achieved the rank of Full Professor, with Professor Steve McKelvey of St. Olaf College achieving this rank just this past week!

Interestingly, the first paper that Stella Dafermos published, which was with her dissertation advisor, Professor F. Tom Sparrow of Hopkins, entitled, "The Traffic Assignment Problem for a General Network," which appeared in the Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards, volume 73B, 1969, acknowledges Dr. Goldman. The footnote on the first page at the bottom of the paper reads: This work was undertaken under contract CST-1278 with the National Bureau of Standards. We wish to acknowledge the many constructive comments of Alan Goldman of the Applied Mathematics Division of the Bureau, and Dr. George Nemhauser of Johns Hopkins University. Nemhauser is very well-known in the operations research (OR) community (and is also a member of NAE); after Hopkins, Nemhauser spent time at Cornell, and then moved to Georgia Tech.

In another paper by Dafermos and Sparrow, entitled, "Optimal Resource Allocation and Toll Patterns in User-Optimised Transport Networks" published in the Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, volume 5, 1971, Goldman is again thanked. In a footnote, on the first page, the following appears: The authors thank the National Bureau of Standards and the Ford Foundation for their financial support. They acknowledge the many constructive suggestions of Dr. Alan Goldman ...

The Johns Hopkins University obituary of Professor Goldman notes that over a dozen doctoral students worked under his supervision. I might add that one of them is my colleague, Professor Alan G. Robinson, of the Department of Finance and Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. The academic community is such a "small world!"

Professor F. Tom Sparrow moved from Hopkins to Purdue University and has since retired.