Saul Gass Expository Writing Award
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2022 Winner(s)
- Warren Powell, Princeton University
Professor Warren Powell has been a prolific writer and communicator whose contributions have helped to significantly shape and advance methods of operations research, and whose writings have impacted practice and policy. Author of hundreds of scholarly articles and multiple books, his works have received well over 20,000 citations. Professor Powell’s books on approximate dynamic programming have inspired researchers and shaped the minds of many in our field. His writings have helped build a path to optimal learning methods that have become a focus of whole communities of researchers and practitioners in recent years. Through his relentless efforts to show and explain how to overcome the “curse of dimensionality,” his work has had a major impact on practice in areas ranging from freight transportation to the smart grid. His methodologies have informed research across engineering and computer science disciplines. Also noteworthy is his undying efforts to create a common language to unite works in disparate fields, a notion that no doubt recognizes that exposition is as important as the math in advancing the field together. For these many reasons, Professor Powell’s contributions to operations research have been recognized through numerous awards for his scholarly publications, including the prestigious INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society’s Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award. For his outstanding contributions to the INFORMS community and operations research, expository excellence in his publications making his work broadly accessible, impact, and the courage to see what is possible, Warren Powell is richly deserving of the Saul Gass Award.
Purpose of the Award
2023 Committee Chair
Michael Trick
Carnegie Mellon University
Please email awards@informs.org
This award recognizes an author whose publications in operations research and management science have set an exemplary standard of exposition. The awardee's written work, published over a period of at least ten years, should indicate (in terms of breadth of readership) an influence and accessibility enhanced by expository excellence. Criteria include the lucidity, conciseness, logic and interest of the writing at all levels, from the general organization to the details. The author must have affected, through these publications, how something is done, studied, taught, or thought about by some group within the OR/MS community.
The written work can contain any combination of practical, theoretical and pedagogical subject matter, and may be original, synthetic or historical. The corpus as a whole must be substantial in content, not necessarily prize-worthy in itself, but not trivial.
Enough of the publications in question must have been singly authored to demonstrate the awardee’s expository skill. A team of authors writing together consistently over many years may also be considered for the award.
The winner will receive $2,000 and a framed certificate that includes a brief citation at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Application Process
Nominations due June 30, 2023
About the Award/Namesake
Saul Gass was the 25th President of ORSA.
Dr. Gass first served as a mathematician for the Aberdeen Bombing Mission, U. S. Air Force, and then transferred to Air Force Headquarters where he began his career in operations research with the Directorate of Management Analysis, the organization in which linear programming was first developed. For IBM, he was an Applied Science Representative, Manager of the Project Mercury Man-in-Space Program, and Manager of IBM's Federal Civil Programs. He was a member of the Science and Technology Task Force of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement. He was Director of Operations Research for CEIR, Senior Vice-President of World Systems Laboratories, and Vice-President of Mathematica. He served as a consultant to the U. S. General Accounting Office, Congressional Budget Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other operations research and systems analysis organizations.
Past Awardees
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
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