Professor Bill Cooper's 96th Birthday

At a dinner party at Professor Georg Pflug's lovely apartment in Vienna, Austria, late last month a group of us who had been invited as part of the Computational Management Science conference that was taking place there were talking about the beautiful minds in our field. We were discussing how we had lost Professor George Dantzig of Stanford at age 90 a few years back and were chatting about how there were still giants among us who were doing research well past what one would consider to be retirement age.

We singled out Professor William "Bill" Cooper of the University of Texas Austin. Little did I realize that, while we were talking about him, it was only a few days past his 96th birthday, which took place on July 23! The McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas issued this nice article to mark this grand achievement of longevity and productivity. Professor Cooper, at age 66, after having previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and at Harvard University, joined the business school faculty of the University of Texas Austin. His professional contributions in accounting, and in operations research and management science are legendary and, I might add, his productivity actually increased in his decade of 78-88 years of age!

Professor Cooper, although now officially retired, still comes to work, and says that he wants to die while living and not from a cold or from pneumonia.

Professor Bill Cooper will be honored at the 2010 INFORMS National Meeting, which will take place next November (conveniently) in Austin, Texas. I plan on being there to thank him and to congratulate him for all of his accomplishments and for his impact.

Above is a letter I received from Professor Cooper when I was named the John F. Smith Memorial Professor (a chaired professorship). The letter hangs in my office directly above my desk. The fact that at age 84, he would take the time to write and have such a letter typed and even mailed to a mutual friend, speaks to the kindness, thoughtfulness, and manners of this titan.

Loving What You Do and Solving the Biggest Problems

CNN has an Opinion Piece by Professor Terence Tao, about whom I have written about in this blog when Forbes featured him. In the Opinion Piece, Professor Tao's love of his work shines through. He is a renowned mathematician, having started his PhD at Princeton at the age of 16, and is now a Professor of Mathematics and the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Science at UCLA. He was born in Australia and is also a citizen of the US.

He writes that, as a child, he: loved games with clear, unambiguous rules; puzzles that were tough but fair; and the clean, abstract, simplicity of numbers and symbols. He says that: it is perhaps not surprising that [he] has been drawn to mathematics for as long as [he] can remember.

Life is not always fair, but being part of a profession that acknowledges when you solve an important problem, is very satisfying (of course, the individual gets the personal satisfaction of the discovery as well and gets it first).

Professor Tao then states that: mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols, but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.

Indeed, the tools of mathematics (accompanied by the use of computers, I might add) are being applied to solve problems in business (from logistics to marketing to finance and accounting). Math is used in healthcare, and in humanitarian operations. It is an essential tool in engineering, in physics, in computer science, in economics, in sociology, and even in biology. Math makes the world hum. It makes order out of disorder and helps to explain chaos. Math "works" and helps to resolve the greatest puzzles of today.

Besides what could be more gratifying than solving problems!

Bill Gates (who needs no introduction) recently visited Harvard University and spoke there. He said, in his speech, that the biggest problems require the best minds. You can find some of the problems that he believes need our attention in this Harvard Gazette article. Obviously, innovative and accessible education is the foundation for it all!