INFORMS News: In Memoriam — John D. Kettelle Jr. (1925-2012)
John D. Kettelle Jr.
John D. Kettelle Jr., a long-time member of INFORMS, its predecessors ORSA and TIMS and the Management Science Roundtable, and a major pioneer in the OR/MS field, died May 31 in Arlington, Va. The following tribute was written by Doug Samuelson, a friend and colleague of Mr. Kettelle for more than 30 years, with input from Larry Stone, chief scientist of Metron, and from Mr. Kettelle’s family.
INFORMS established a prize for innovative, mathematically clever practice in 1998 in honor of Daniel H. Wagner. John Kettelle wrote the OR/MS Today tribute to Dan Wagner, published in the October 1997 issue. Mr. Kettelle wrote that, paraphrasing Shakespeare, he wanted not so much to praise Dan Wagner as to help us learn from him. This tribute is intended in the same spirit and hence will not dwell on his many activities in ORSA, TIMS, INFORMS, the Washington, D. C. chapter (WORMSC/WINFORMS) and MORS. He was most influential via his lengthy participation in the Management Science Roundtable; like many others in government contracting, he generally eschewed formal offices but wielded considerable influence. His contribution was in his ideas, not his titles.
In 1957, Mr. Kettelle, who was working for Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, Mass., attended a conference on information theory and met Dan Wagner, who was working for Burroughs in Paoli, Pa. They had been graduate students in mathematics at Brown from 1946 to 1948. (Mr. Kettelle had received his bachelor’s degree in electronic physics from Harvard in 1945.) After some discussion, Mr. Kettelle took a job with Burroughs and moved to Paoli. In December 1957 he entered into a formal partnership with Mr. Wagner. In 1958, they obtained their first contract, which was to perform reliability analyses for the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). Mr. Kettelle resigned from Burroughs and on May 1, 1958 started Kettelle and Wagner operations from an office in his Valley Forge, Pa., farmhouse.
At the time most O.R. contracting in the Department of Defense (DoD) was done with large companies who had an interest in selling hardware as well as analysis. Kettelle and Wagner was one of the first small, independent O.R. companies. Its lack of a hardware bias made it attractive to groups in DoD interested in unbiased analyses. (Mr. Kettelle’s service as a naval officer in World War II and Korea, the latter as a submarine officer, most likely boosted their credibility, too.)
The company quickly became involved in anti-submarine warfare. Their work for the Office of Naval Research on analyzing submarine tactics demonstrated the importance of submarine silencing in maintaining tactical advantage over an adversarial submarine. This analysis was presented to Secretary of Defense McNamara to justify the procurement of new submarines. During this time Mr. Kettelle developed what is now the standard model for computing passive acoustic detection probabilities over an interval of opportunity.
Although Mr. Kettle and Mr. Wagner enjoyed working together and remained good friends throughout their lives, they came to realize that they were not suited to be business partners. As Mr. Kettelle himself explained in his tribute to Mr. Wagner, “Dan felt that I was too elliptical (inclined to omit much of the rigor), and I felt he was too hyperbolic (insisting on details only a mathematician could love.)” They decided to dissolve the partnership in the spring of 1963 and to split the physical assets. Mr. Wagner went on to found Daniel H. Wagner Associates and Mr. Kettelle to found the John D. Kettelle Corporation.
Later Mr. Kettelle founded the analysis and software firm Ketron, which grew to some 300 people by the mid-1990s and became a major resource and contributor to O.R. Among Mr. Kettelle’s more noteworthy contributions were improvements in search theory and the invention of its counterpart, hide theory, in anti-submarine warfare. Ketron also developed the MPS III non-linear programming solver, a product that remains commercially viable and supported through Ketron Management Sciences, a spin-off company. Ketron’s work ranged from a variety of defense projects to some civilian-side tasks including generating voting districts and improving efficiency of county-wide school busing.
Computerized Third Party Mediation
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Mr. Kettelle turned his attention to how negotiated ends to wars could be expedited. He had the painfully protracted U.S. pullout from Vietnam in mind. As he noted dryly in a talk he gave to the Washington, D.C., chapter of ORSA/TIMS in 1985, “We Americans have reached a consensus about Vietnam. (Pause for audience to gasp.) We all agree that we attempted either far too much or far too little.” He also noted the Japanese attempts to negotiate peace terms starting in the late spring of 1945. Unfortunately, the “neutral” intermediary they chose to try to open a back channel was the Soviet Union, which instead saw the overture as vulnerability and proceeded to enter the war against Japan. What if, he wondered, a truly trustworthy means existed for parties to indicate the terms on which they would be willing to strike a deal, and then obtain an impartial, disinterested indication of whether a deal was possible?
This question inspired one of the major efforts of Mr. Kettelle’s career: computerized third party (CTP) mediation. Mr. Kettelle and Metron teamed to win a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant to pursue the idea in the mid-2000s. He applied for a method patent for CTP in 2007; as of this writing, no patent had been issued. It is perhaps unfortunate that the sponsor then urged Mr. Kettelle and Metron to consider the Middle East peace negotiations as an example application. The complications there are unusually vexatious, as many other would-be peacemakers have also learned, and the demonstration was inconclusive.
Mr. Kettelle recognized the value of pursuing other applications, especially another passion of his later years: reorganizing whole industries to improve efficiency. He advocated massive consolidation, particularly in maintenance and parts supply, in the airline and trucking industries, with some success in contracts in the latter.
Mr. Kettelle concluded his tribute to Dan Wagner by stating his conviction that mature scientists with rigorous scientific backgrounds and high professional standards “can bring a unique and valuable approach to the solution of operational problems.” As Mr. Kettelle demonstrated, both by successes and setbacks, these attributes are even more valuable when combined with a keen appreciation of what the customer values and is prepared to adopt. His loving family and many friends and colleagues remember him as well for his lively intellect, his quick sense of humor, his wealth of amusing and informative anecdotes, his breadth of interests and experience, his readiness to debate any topic with anybody, and his generosity and mentoring to beneficiaries too numerous to identify.
Mr. Kettelle is survived by his wife of 32 years, Nancy Senti Kettelle of Arlington, Va., his six children and 13 grandchildren.
