I teach quantitative methods to management students. We learn O.R. Statistics etc. with a lot of mathematical derivations thrown in. Are they of use to a better understanding of the type of management problem we encounter in real life or propose to solve? This is a moot question which we, teachers of management Science try to answer. I also started with a premise that mathematical content may not be necessary and followed for the last few years, various management science text books with this orientation. What i feel is we have to understand first what we want the students to become - management scientists or management science practitioners. while much of the solution process is through the software and computing power, a good basic understanding of the mathematical foundation may be required for the formulation of the problem especially in the appropriate domain of say optimization. However, when the problem is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem, the solution process follows its own methodology by analysing the structure and decides whether an approximately linear solution is possible. Why and how it decides is not known to the practitioner but known only to the architect of software. This is an are where we may say practitioners may not require rigorous knowledge of the mathematical basis.
I have however tried to introduce mathematical formulations as a part of the course and has found it useful
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Nilakantan Narasinganallur
Associate Professor - Quantitative Methods
K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research
Mumbai
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