ORSA President, 1981
George Nemhauser was the 30th President of ORSA. He is the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Upon receiving his PhD, he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University where he remained until 1969. In 1970, he moved to Cornell University where he was Leon C. Welch professor in operations research and industrial engineering and served as chair from 1977 to 1983. He came to Georgia Tech in 1985.
Dr. Nemhauser was co-director of the Logistics Engineering Center at Georgia Tech. He served the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) as council member, president, and editor of Operations Research. He was also chair of the Mathematical Programming Society. He is the founding editor of Operations Research Letters, and co-editor of Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science.
His research focus is in solving large-scale mixed-integer programming problems and supply chain applications. He is a partner in the Sports Scheduling Group which schedules major league baseball and various sports for many college leagues. He is the author of three books including Integer and Combinatorial Optimization with Laurence Wolsey which received the Lanchester prize. He is also one of the editors of several handbooks and has published nearly 200 papers including one that received the Lanchester prize. He has supervised more than 50 PhD dissertations. His former students hold positions at Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago, Cornell, Florida, Maryland, Northwestern, Wisconsin, USC, and many other institutions. They won several prizes for their dissertations including the Dantzig Prize.
Dr. Nemhauser has consulted to various governmental agencies, including the NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Research Council (NRC). He is a member of the NRC's Board of Mathematical Sciences. He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Leeds, U.K., and the University of Louvain, Belgium where he was Director of Research for two years.
As President of ORSA he initiated the doctoral colloquium which has become a staple component of the INFORMS Annual Meetings.
His honors and awards include Fellow of INFORMS (2002), member of the National Academy of Engineering(1986), ORSA’s Kimball Medal (1988), the Lanchester Prize (awarded twice, 1977 and 1990), and Morse lecturer of ORSA.(1990) and the first recipient of the Khachiyan Prize of the Optimization Society in 2010. He was NSF Senior Faculty Fellow (1969)
BChE, 1958, CCNY; MS, 1958, Northwestern; PhD (Operations Research), 1961, Northwestern