ORSA President, 1954
Jacinto Steinhardt was the 3rd President of ORSA. A founding member of ORSA, Jacinto (Jay) Steinhardt served on the original Council and Publications Committee of the Society in 1952-53. He was elected Vice President of ORSA the following year and acceded to the Presidency in the Society's third year. He contributed greatly over the years to the operations research community through his work in military O.R. and his thoughts on the philosophy of the discipline.
After earning his doctorate in 1934, he became a National Research Fellow at the Physical-Chemical Institute in Copenhagen. Subsequently, he held positions at the Physiological Laboratory in England (as General Education Board Fellow) and at the Physical-Chemical Institute in Upssala, Sweden. He was also a Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard University. In 1938, he joined the Laboratories of the Textile Foundation at the National Bureau of Standards as a physical chemist. The latter position was interrupted in 1942, when he joined the Anti-Submarine Warfare Group (ASWORG) of the United States Navy.
When Philip Morse, the wartime director of ASWORG (renamed the Operations Research Group ORG), returned to MIT in 1946, Jay became the new director. He had been a very effective member of the group, having successful assignments with the Fourth Fleet in Brazil and the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific. He had also organized and ably directed AirORG. Jay remained with the organization as the Director of the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG) for sixteen years, when it changed into the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). Through his able leadership over the years, OEG built a world-wide reputation for scientific excellence.
His lifelong contributions to the profession have been memorialized by the Military Applications Society of INFORMS with the establishment of The J. Steinhardt Prize, to honor individual career accomplishments in practicing or managing military operations research.
Jacinto Steinhardt died in 1985.
BS, 1927, MS 1928, Ph.D. (Chemistry) 1934, Columbia University