Some writings on the history and philosophy of operations research, Christopher Thomas Ryan
This website will contain writings from three projects.
(I) An annotated bibliography of article-length "thought pieces" primarily from (arguably) the four most important journals in the development of operations research: Operations Research, Management Science, Interfaces, and the Journal of Operational Research Society. By "thought pieces", I mean articles that were not the usual "research paper" many of us are familiar with in OR, but instead offer perpectives, opinions, and experiences that pertain to the development of Operations Reseach.
I will provide references with links to the articles and offer my own personal exploration of the content of that article. These explorations will attempt to summarize, but also raise questions or areas of further exploration that inspired me when I read the article.
(II) A collection of essays on my personal journey to understand my relationship to the field of Operations Research. These essays will also touch on anectdotes from the history of Operations Research from its origins until roughly the present day.
(III) Reviews of books that pertain to the history and philosophy of Operations Rearch.
An explanatory note
These writings will focus on the history and philosophy of the field I will call Operations Research (OR) but with a few words of warning. The field of OR has many alternative names that, as far as I can tell, have roughly the same meaning but with different connotations and sometimes attached to different communities. These alternatives includes "operational research" (the "official" name of OR in Canada, the UK, and parts of Europe still today), "management science", and "analytics".
There are several other fields that are closely aligned with OR, and discussion of its history cannot be fully separated from a discussion of these related fields.
The first is Operations Management (OM) (what is maybe also called "production management", "industrial management", or "scientific management" at various times in history). As I understand it currently, OM claims a long historical tradition going back essentially to the origins of commerce in antiquity. By contrast, the history of OR dates more to the use of science in war in the 20th century, especially World War II. However, after World War II, and particularly since the 1960s, the academic field of OM became tightly intertwined with OR. Understanding the history and meaning of OM seems critical for understanding the history and meaning of OR. There are some boundary and juridictional distinctions here that seem unresolved to this day.
The second is the academic field of optimization or mathematical programming. Optimization has roots before the term OR was coined (dating back to Newton, Leibniz, Fourier, Motzkin, Euler, etc) but becomes an area of rapid growth within the auspices of academic OR in the post-World War II period, particularly from 1947 (when linear programming was formally exposited) through the 1970s. In the 1970s, optimizers created their own academic society (the Mathematical Programming Society, now the Mathematical Optimization Society) and academic journal (Mathematical Programming). Understanding the overlaps and boundaries between the fields and OR and Optimization and how they co-evolved seems unavoidable for any narrative of the history of OR.
The third is industrial engineering. At the time of writing this, I have not studied enough about the history of industrial engineering to say much about its overlaps and boundaries with OR, other than to say that it might possible include both OR and OM in its definitional auspices, although there seem to be somewhat separate academic communities involved. This is something I am actively trying to understand.
Fourth is a managerie of related fields or approaches that have the word "systems" in their name: systems analysis, systems research, systems science, systems engineering, system dynamics, and so on. As far as I understand it currently, OR predates this proliferation of these "systems" disciplines and maybe these disciplines were a response to some of the limitations of how OR was conceived. But I think, like with OM and IE, there are some boundary and juridictional distinctions here that appear to me to be unresolved to this day.
Finally, there are several academic fields that bear close relationships with OR but I believe have clearer distinctions. These are microeconomics, game theory, applied mathematics, computer science, information systems, data science, and artificial intelligence. I think it is unavoidable to discuss these subjects in the history of OR, but I hope to spend less effort litigating overlaps and boundaries with OR.