TIMS President, 1961
A pioneer in operations research during its formative years, Murray A. Geisler served as the eighth president of TIMS. He spent most of his career at the Rand Corporation, where he was senior logistician in the Logistics Department until 1983.
Murray Geisler started his career as a statistician. His pioneering contributions to operations research started soon after World War II, when he was working in the Pentagon’s Air Force Evaluation Group with Bob Dorfman. He was then selected as the branch chief in Project SCOOP (Scientific Computation of Optimal Programs), the project that pioneered the use of mathematical programming to solve military planning problems. Geisler’s role was to formulate the model that captured the plan or program stated by the Air Staff. In the words of George Dantzig, who worked closely with Geisler during this period, "Murray Geisler achieved a historic breakthrough" by automating the process of model formulation, solution, and interpretation.
Acting on the recommendation of George Dantzig, The Rand Corporation recruited Murray Geisler in 1954 to head its logistical research program in Santa Monica, California. Geisler spent the next thirty years at Rand, except for the time he spent pursuing his doctorate at Stanford and visiting MIT’s Sloan School in 1974-1975. The bulk of his work at Rand focused on Air Force studies. In the early 1950’s, Murray Geisler authored key research reports dealing with inventory management problems encountered with B-47 aircraft.
At Rand, Dr. Geisler held positions as director of logistics studies and head of the Logistics Department. In 1976, he accepted a position with the logistics Management Institute in Washington, D.C. He died on August 6, 1985 at his home in Los Angeles.
BS, (mathematics), 1938, CCNY; MA, 1940 (statistics), Columbia; PhD 1962 (statistics), Stanford.