INFORMS News: In Memoriam — Clarence Adam Haverly Jr. (1925-2011)
Clarence Adam Haverly Jr.
Clarence Adam Haverly Jr. – “Larry” to his friends and colleagues, founder and president of Haverly Systems, Inc. and recognized worldwide in the field of mathematical optimization – died April 15. He was 86.
Larry was born in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from Ohio State University (Chemical Engineering), and then received an MBA. He served in WWII as a Navy radar specialist. Subsequently he worked at Merck Pharmaceuticals, and later joined Esso Petroleum and Esso Research (now Exxon). This was during the early use of computers in the oil industry, and Larry became intrigued by the possibilities of applying optimization methods to the industry’s business operations. He quickly became an expert in this area.
In the early 1960s, it was estimated that the solution of linear programs (LPs) consumed 40 percent of all computer time, and such LPs were getting bigger and more ubiquitous. A major difficulty was in preparing the computer data that described LPs, which, although sparse, often had many thousands of non-zero coefficients. Initially, there was only a standard SHARE input format that required each nonzero be entered by row and column names, usually accomplished by platoons of punch card operators and verifiers.
Larry put an end to all that. He saw that an LP model’s data could be readily compacted and formatted into tables in a column-oriented way. (A column-oriented formulation was the preferred modeling technique of engineers and economists). These insights were to be the foundation of his first product, the MAGEN matrix generator.
In 1962, Larry started Haverly Systems Inc. that provided and implemented MAGEN and LP solvers for companies and individuals, enabling them to obtain powerful results, even on the relatively modest computers of the time. MAGEN was superseded by the OMNI Model Management System, which, over the years, has evolved for a range of large mainframes and PCs. The company continues to develop decision support solutions, focusing mainly on complex planning and scheduling problems in the process industry.
Larry also contributed to the computer and operations research professions: as an ACM member, he developed and edited the ACM SIGMAP Newsletter/Bulletin; he was a member of the Mathematical Programming Society and served on its Committee on Standards, later the Committee on Algorithms (COAL); and, as a longtime member of ORSA and INFORMS, he could often be found demonstrating Haverly Systems’ latest developments at their annual meetings.
Larry remained active in his profession long after most of his contemporaries had retired or passed away. He was still active until two weeks before he died of cancer, the passing of a great computing pioneer.
Larry’s official obituary, giving details of his personal and family life, can be found at: http://normandean.com/online-obituary/80286.
John Tomlin, Saul Gass and George Macdonald contributed to this article.
