Tuesday, July 13, 2004
"the most important field nobody's ever heard of"
This weekend, in between watching a play starring Emperor Palpatine at the Old Vic and tromping up a couple of the Mendip hills and visiting a few drinking establishments, Jetset and I rode buses around Bristol. In a lull between gossiping about McGill friends, he asked me to explain what O.R. is and what I'm doing at work.
I think I did a reasonable job of explaining, but this article by Virginia Postrel does it better. There's a good history of O.R. there as well, though it leaves out soft OR/problem structuring methods, developed in part to address the difficulty of applying O.R. to strategic problems.
Many thanks to Tukul, who passed on the link from arts and letters daily.
