Dear INFORMS community:
Since last year, I've been writing long-form narrative essays on operations research and related themes for a general audience (i.e. an audience curious about science but that has never heard of operations research). Below I have provided the title and links to the essays (clicking on the title should take you to the full text online). A couple of the pieces, you'll notice, are on healthcare, which happens to be my research emphasis. The website that hosts these essays is a science and humanities website with a diverse readership called 3 Quarks Daily, and I am a guest columnist at this website.
1. How much should you plan for? Decision-making under demand uncertainty.
2. Unconditioned by the past: Exploring the memoryless property of the Exponential Distribution.
3. The shortest path, the traveling salesman and an unsolved question
4. Some thoughts on the science of queuing
5. On delays in access to care in American hospitals
6. A mobile surgical unit and a rural health center in Ecuador
Comments are welcome!
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Hari Balasubramanian
Associate Professor
Univ of Massachusetts- Amherst
Amherst MA
Website: people.umass.edu/hbalasub
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