John D. C. Little

Brief Biography

Born in Boston and raised in idyllic Andover, Massachusetts, John Dutton Conant Little attended the prestigious Philips Academy and completed his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Little decided to take a pause in his education and hitchhiked across the country for ten months and took on such jobs as sheep ranch laborer and car valet. He joined the professional industrial world as an engineer for General Electric before returning to MIT for graduate school.

During his graduate study, Little chose operations research over traditional physics at the suggestion of Philip M. Morse, the founder of OR in the United States. Under Morse, Little became the first operations research doctoral student in the United States. In his dissertation, “Use of Storage Water in a Hydroelectric System”, he proposed what was likely the first non-military application of dynamic programming. Little received his PhD in 1955 and was shortly after drafted into the U.S. Army.

During his two years with the Army, Little served as an analyst of traditional military OR problems such as probabilistic models of land mine warfare. After his discharge in 1957, he accepted a position at Case Institute of Technology where he was first introduced to advertising problems.  Little’s legacy was established by his early work there. As various companies approached the faculty at Case with real-world issues, Little gained the necessary experience to teach an OR graduate course in marketing. It was around this time that he developed Little’s Law (L=λW). Little proved this queueing formula in which the average number of customers in a queueing system (L) was equivalent to the average arrival rate of customers (λ) times the average wait time (W).

Little returned to MIT in 1962 on the faculty of School of Industrial Management. He undertook the improvement of traffic signals. Little went about solving this problem via computational methods rather than traditional hand-drawn graphs, greatly expediting the process. He soon after explored marketing as a source of new OR research. Little became interested in and published papers about problems surrounding advertising budget and media selection. The real world application of his work led him to the realization that few managers actually employed serious management science at the time and provoked his “Models and Managers” paper, considered one of the ten most influential papers published in Management Science. Little’s fascination with the subject culminated in the foundation of Management Decision Systems, Inc. with fellow MIT professor Glen L. Urban. The company eventually merged with Information Resource, Incorporated in 1985.

Little has the distinction of having been elected president of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) that merged ORSA and TIMS. He played a monumental role in merging the two organizations in 1995 and was named the first president of the resulting organization. He is one of only two people (the other being Alfred Blumstein) to serve a president of all three organizations. The INFORMS award for the best paper published in marketing or management science is named in his honor.

Little has been an Institute Professor at M.I.T. (a special rank of the highest honor for MIT faculty) since 1989. He is a dedicated educator across all levels of undergraduate and graduate study. 

Other Biographies

Profiles in Operations Research: John D. C. Little
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Wikipedia Entry for John D.C. Little

INFORMS. Miser-Harris Presidential Gallery: John D. C. Little. Accessed January 27, 2017. (link)

Larson R. (2004) IFOR's Operational Research Hall of Fame: John D. C. Little. International Transactions in Operations Research, 11(2):361-364. (link)

Karagianis L. (2006) The Greatest of MIT's Great Faculty: John Little. Spectrum, Summer 2006. (link)

John D. C. Little (2014) Interview by Robert Klein, September 4, 2014.  Video by Lawrence Gallagher, Cambridge MA

Robert Klein Interviews John D. C. Little, September 4, 2014

NOTE:  The video chapter transcripts below are searchable, with search results displayed as marks on the time bar above the search box.  Click a mark to jump to the search word or phrase in the video and transcript, or click on any word in the transcript to jump to that point in the video.

John D. C. Little (2015) Interview by Robert L. Klein. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. (see embedded YouTube video below)