Frederick S. Hillier

The winner of the 2004 Expository Writing Award is Frederick S. Hillier for his book Introduction to Operations Research, coauthored by Gerald J. Lieberman. If Jerry Lieberman were still alive, the Committee would have given the award jointly to both coauthors.

Over 37 years, successive editions of this book have introduced more than one-half million students to the field and have attracted many people to enter the field for academic activity and professional practice. Many leaders in the field and many current instructors first learned about the field via an edition of this book. The extensive use of international student editions and translations into 15 other languages has contributed to spreading the field around the world. The book remains preeminent even after 37 years. Although the eighth edition just appeared, the seventh edition had 46% of the market for books of its kind, and it ranked second in international sales among all McGraw-Hill publications in engineering.

Two features account for this success. First, the editions have been outstanding from students’ points of view due to excellent motivation, clear and intuitive explanations, good examples of professional practice, excellent organization of material, very useful supporting software, and appropriate but not excessive mathematics. Second, the editions have been attractive from instructors’ points of view because they repeatedly infuse state-of-the-art material with remarkable lucidity and plain language. For example, a wonderful chapter on metaheuristics was created for the eighth edition.

The Committee members, namely Martin Lariviere, Andrzej Ruszczynski and Matthew J. Sobel, are proud to designate Frederick S. Hiller as the recipient of the 2004 INFORMS Expository Writing Award.