INFORMS Open Forum

Remembering Harvey Greenberg

  • 1.  Remembering Harvey Greenberg

    Posted 07-17-2018 12:35
    INFORMS is saddened to share the passing of Harvey Greenberg, a longtime member and Fellow of INFORMS, and the namesake of the INFORMS Computing Society Harvey J. Greenberg Service Award. 

    Harvey Greenberg received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from The Johns Hopkins University in 1968. He held positions in academia, government, and industry, and conducted research spanning developing areas of applied mathematics, computational economics, and computer science. He developed Computer-Assisted Analysis in the 1970s and 80s, creating an artificially intelligent environment for analyzing mathematical programming models and their results. This earned him the first ICS Prize for "research excellence in the interfaces between operations research and computer science" in 1986, notably for his software system, ANALYZE. Harvey received several research awards since that time, including the Canadian Operational Research Society's Harold Larnder Prize for "international distinction in Operational Research."

    Harvey recognized the importance of the operations research / computer science interface early, and was intimately involved in important research on this topic; he co-edited the Special Issue of Operations Research on Computer Science in 1978. He was also instrumental in establishing and developing what is today the INFORMS Computing Society. He was a founder of the ORSA Computer Science Special Interest Group, established 1976. As its second Chair, he led the effort to transform the CS SIG into the ORSA Computer Science Technical Section, which became the ICS in 1998. Harvey led the organization of the first CSTS Symposium held in 1985, which later became the biennial ICS conference. He chaired CSTS in 1986 and led the effort to establish the ORSA Journal on Computing, launched in 1987 and now known as the INFORMS Journal on Computing, and served as the first editor. In 1993, he contributed the first book in the OR/CS Series entitled A Computer-Assisted Analysis System for Mathematical Programming Models and Solutions: a User's Guide for ANALYZE. He created the online Mathematical Programming Glossary, a much-used feature of the ICS web site.

    During his 30 years of professional development, Harvey introduced many courses in the OR/CS interface, most recently in computational biology. He has applied OR methods to CS problems, ranging from using queuing theory for optimal list structure design to using integer programming for bioinformatic database search; and he has applied CS to OR problems, ranging from super-sparse information structures to the use of compiler design in ANALYZE.



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    Scharan Johnson
    Director of Membership and Communities
    INFORMS
    Catonsville MD
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