ORSA President, 1976
Saul Gass was the 25th President of ORSA.
Dr. Gass first served as a mathematician for the Aberdeen Bombing Mission, U.S. Air Force, and then transferred to Air Force Headquarters where he began his career in operations research with the Directorate of Management Analysis, the organization in which linear programming was first developed. For IBM, he was an Applied Science Representative, Manager of the Project Mercury Man-in-Space Program, and Manager of IBM's Federal Civil Programs. He was a member of the Science and Technology Task Force of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement. He was Director of Operations Research for CEIR, Senior Vice-President of World Systems Laboratories, and Vice-President of Mathematica. He served as a consultant to the U. S. General Accounting Office, Congressional Budget Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other operations research and systems analysis organizations.
Included in his many publications are the texts Linear Programming (fifth edition) and Decision Making, Models and Algorithms, and the book An Illustrated Guide to Linear Programming. He is co-author of the book An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research: An Informal History, and co-author/editor of Profiles in Operations Research: Pioneers and Innovators. He is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Sciences and A Guide to Models in Governmental Planning and Operations.
Dr. Gass was a president of Omega Rho, the international operations research honor society. He served as vice-president for international activities of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and vice-president of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). He was a recipient of ORSA's Kimball Medal for distinguished service to the society and the profession, INFORMS's Expository Writing Award for publications in operations research that have set an exemplary standard of exposition, and the Military Operations Research Society's Jacinto Steinhardt Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to military operations research. He was a Fellow of INFORMS. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the Computer and Automation Research Institution, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Dr. Gass was a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and the Dean's Lifetime Achievement Professor for the Robert H. Smith School of Business.
His research interests included linear programming, large-scale systems, model validation and evaluation, game theory, multi-objective decision analysis, the application of operations research methodologies, and the history of operations research and related fields.
BS (education), Boston University 1949; MA (mathematics) Boston University, 1949; PhD (Engineering Science/Operations Research) University of California at Berkeley, 1965.