{"id":11470,"date":"2013-03-23T13:42:06","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T17:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=11470"},"modified":"2013-03-23T13:42:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-23T17:42:06","slug":"saul-gass-1926-2013-practitioner-historian-of-operations-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2013\/03\/23\/saul-gass-1926-2013-practitioner-historian-of-operations-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Saul Gass (1926-2013), Practitioner-Historian of Operations Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gass<\/a>I was just passing by the website of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences<\/a> (INFORMS), and was sorry to see that Saul Gass has died. \u00a0Gass was a well-known name in the OR and computation community. \u00a0He was part of the U. S. Air Force’s Project SCOOP, which, led by George Dantzig (1914-2005), developed the widely used mathematical technique of linear programming (which is also elemental in modern economic theory), and the powerful simplex algorithm. \u00a0Later, while working for IBM, he was the manager of the Simulation Group of the Mercury Man-in-Space Program. For more on Gass, see INFORMS’s online memorial<\/span><\/a><\/span>, or, better still, essays in the Festschrift for Gass’s 80th birthday (much of which is available via Google Books<\/span><\/a><\/span>).<\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted to mention Gass here, because he is also the type of person who is invaluable to professional historians of science: the practitioner-historian. We historians sometimes set up an “official” or “insider” story as a kind of foil for our work, but if we’re being honest we’ll have to admit we depend greatly on the work of insiders. Among other essays, Gass wrote a handy piece called “The First Linear Programming Shoppe”<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0on Project SCOOP in the truly useful 50th anniversary issue<\/span><\/a><\/span> of Operations Research<\/em>. \u00a0He also teamed with Arjang Assad<\/span><\/a><\/span> to compile\u00a0An Annotated\u00a0<\/em>Timeline of Operations Research: An Informal History <\/em><\/span><\/span><\/a>(2005), which is pretty much what it says on the tin (as the British like to say). \u00a0Personally, I love it for its copious references. \u00a0The two teamed up again to edit the very useful biography collection\u00a0Profiles in Operations Research<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/em>(2011).<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was first starting in on the history of OR, Gass was also very supportive of my work. \u00a0I was part of two history sessions at INFORMS Annual Meetings (a very different, much larger beast than\u00a0HSS<\/span><\/a><\/span>), which he was involved with. \u00a0That experience actually led to my first publication<\/span><\/a><\/span>. \u00a0Gass\u00a0<\/span>also kindly lent me his personal copies of Project SCOOP reports. \u00a0The above image is his copy of the touchstone report, “Scientific Planning of Military Programs” (1948). \u00a0Thanks for being a friend to history, Saul.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was just passing by the website of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and was sorry to see that Saul Gass has died. \u00a0Gass was a well-known name in the OR and computation community. \u00a0He was part of the U. S. Air Force’s Project SCOOP, which, led by George Dantzig<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Saul Gass (1926-2013), Practitioner-Historian of Operations Research<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[123,509,1343],"class_list":["post-11470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-operations-research","tag-arjang-assad","tag-george-dantzig","tag-saul-gass"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}