INFORMS is saddened to share the news of the passing of Te Chiang Hu (known as TC by his friends and colleagues). He was 90. A 2013 INFORMS Fellow, Hu was a longtime member of INFORMS who made many significant contributions in OR/MS and analytics.
Born in 1930 in Beijing, Hu lived through World War II and the Japanese occupation before fleeing to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War to attend National Taiwan University, where he earned his Bachelor of Engineering. After emigrating to the U.S., he earned a master's degree in engineering from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University. Hu's first postdoctoral position was as a research mathematician at the IBM Research Center.
Hu left IBM in 1966 and joined the Computer Science faculty at the University of Wisconsin. He was made a full professor two years later and joined the Mathematics Research Center. In 1974, Hu moved to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
In 2013, Hu was elected a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, "for his fundamental research on the borders of operations research and computer science, including network flows, integer programming, shortest paths, binary trees, and for his authoritative books on these topics."
As a computer scientist, Hu broke away from the common trend of establishing new theoretical models and instead focused on inventing new algorithms that can more efficiently solve well-known problems. His papers and journal articles have been incredibly important in bringing new concepts to computer science and presenting algorithms with which one can revisit existing problems and solve them in the best possible fashion.
To learn more about Hu, his life, impact and contributions, visit his biographical profile on the INFORMS website.
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Scharan Johnson
Director of Membership and Communities
INFORMS
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