Fred W. Glover

Brief Biography

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Fred W. Glover is a John von Neumann Theory Prize recipient who has made fundamental contributions to integer programming, networks, and combinatorial optimization. Glover obtained a bachelors of business administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City prior to pursuing graduate study at Carnegie-Mellon University. At Carnegie, he studied under Gerald L. Thompson and received a PhD in operations research in 1965. His dissertation introduced surrogate constraints and an improved data structure for implicit enumeration. Glover joined the University of California, Berkeley as a Research Fellow prior to becoming Associate Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

At Texas, Glover supervised and graduated future president of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), Robert Eugene D. Woolsey. In 1969, he became Research Director at Analysis, Research and Computation, Inc., holding that position concurrently with his academic posts for twelve years. Glover left Austin in 1970 to become the John King Chaired Professor and Professor of Management Science at the University of Colorado. He kept a close working relationship with UT professor Darwin D. Klingman, however, working on reducing computation time and memory requirement of network optimization algorithms. The editorial board of Networks created the Glover-Klingman Prize for best paper to appear in that publication in recognition of the duo's innovation implementation of network optimization algorithms.

In the 1970s, Glover and Darwin Klingman began their revolutionary work in network optimization. The duo developed new data structures, algorithms, and computer implementations that vastly improved network codes. In addition to the development of theory and methodology, Glover and Klingman played significant roles in disseminating their work to the practitioner community. Later, Glover developed the framework of the metaheuristic “Tabu Search”, which has had a significant impact on how operations researchers go about solving difficult combinatorial problems. He coined the term “Tabu Search” in a 1986 article that spawned countless related applications across the world, ranging from scheduling problems to financial planning. Glover’s development of this invaluable method led to him receiving the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1998.

In addition to his professorial positions at the University of Colorado, where he holds the title of Distinguished Professor, Emeritus,  Glover was the founding Director of Research at the university’s Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence and Head of Research at the NASA Center for Space Construction. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he served as Director of Technology Development at Management Robotics. From 1992 to  2014 Glover served as Chief Technology Officer for OptTek Systems, Inc and currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer of Entanglement, Inc..

Glover has received a number of honors for his career contributions. In 2010, he was named a co-recipient of the INFORMS Impact Prize with the Solver development team (Daniel Fylstra, Leon Lasdon, Edwin Straver, Allan Waren, and John Watson). He was recognized for his pioneering work in metaheuristics (an area which he himself named), beginning with the introduction of scatter search in a 1977 Decision Sciences article. Glover is an inaugural Fellow the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and a two-time recipient of the Computing Society Prize. Most recently, he received the 2013 Herbert Simon Award for Outstanding Contribution in Information Technology and Decision Making with Gary Kochenberger for their pioneering research on new optimization models for data mining, and in 2022 received the IJOC Test of Time award from the INFORMS Journal on Computing under the editorship of Alice E. Smith in recognition of the impact through the years of his papers on the field of combinatorial optimization.   

. 

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for Fred W. Glover

University of Colorado. Leeds School of Business Faculty: Fred W. Glover. Accessed May 5, 2015. (link)