Donald W. Hearn passed away on July 9 in Pinehurst, North Carolina. He retired from the University of Florida in 2007 as professor emeritus after joining the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at in 1971. He received his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of North Carolina where he was named a Morehead Scholar and received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Johns Hopkins University in management science and operations research. He served as a software consultant for the federal agencies USDA (environmental impacts of pesticides), HUD (new community development), FAA (aviation system maintenance) and DOT (urban transportation network models and algorithms). He spent 1976-1978 at Mathematica on DOT-sponsored research on large-scale traffic flow and network aggregation methods with Harold Kuhn. His teaching interests included decision modeling and methods, nonlinear optimization and large-scale optimization.
In addition to the University of Florida, Don taught at MIT, and taught short courses at the University of Rome and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His research interests focused on applied optimization and transportation science. He is best known for his work on the development of efficient algorithms for models that arise in urban traffic assignment, urban water management and sports management. He made particular contributions to the problem of computing tolls to control congestion. He was founding editor of OPTIMA, the newsletter of the Mathematical Programming Society, and served as an associate editor of the journals Computational Optimization and Applications and Operations Research. He is author/co-author of more than 67 refereed articles and is co-editor of the books “Large-scale Optimization: State of the Art, Network Optimization” and “Mathematical and Computational Methods for Congestion Charging”; and was a co-editor of the book series “Applied Optimization.”
From 1997 to 2007, Don served as department chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of INFORMS. From 2007 to 2012, he was program manager for Optimization and Discrete Mathematics at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). In addition, he served as co-program manager and consultant for Service, Manufacturing and Operations Research at the National Science Foundation.