RICHARD W. COTTLE
An Oral History conducted by Kandis Scott
STANFORD HISTORICAL SOCIETY ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Stanford University ©2015
2
Richard W. Cottle
3 4 Contents
Introduction p. 7 Abstract p. 9 Biography p. 11 Interview Transcripts p. 15 Curriculum Vitae p. 93 Index p. 117
5 6 Introduction
This oral history was conducted by the Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program, in collaboration with the Stanford University Archives. The program is under the direction of the Oral History Committee of the Stanford Historical Society.
The Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program furthers the Society’s mission “to foster and support the documentation, study, publication, dissemination, and preservation of the history of the Leland Stanford Junior University.” The program explores the institutional history of the University, with an emphasis on the transformative post-WWII period, through interviews with leading faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, and others. The interview recordings and transcripts provide valuable additions to the existing collection of written and photographic materials in the Stanford University Archives.
Oral history is not a final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a unique, reflective, spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it may be deeply personal. Each oral history is a reflection of the past as the interviewee remembers and recounts it. But memory and meaning vary from person to person; others may recall events differently. Used as primary source material, any one oral history will be compared with and evaluated in light of other evidence, such as contemporary texts and other oral histories, in arriving at an interpretation of the past. Although the interviewees have a past or current connection with Stanford University, they are not speaking as representatives of the University.
Each transcript is edited by program staff and by the interviewee for grammar, syntax, and occasional inaccuracies and to aid in overall clarity and readability, while maintaining the substantive content of the interview as well as the interviewee’s voice. As a result of this editing process, the transcript does not match the recording verbatim. In the rare case that a substantive deletion has been made, this is indicated at the relevant place on the transcript. Any substantive additions are noted in brackets or by footnote.
7 All uses of the interview transcripts and recordings are covered by a legal agreement between Richard W. Cottle and the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (“Stanford”). The copyright to the transcripts and recordings, including the right to publish, is reserved by Stanford University.
The transcripts and recordings are freely made available for non-commercial purposes, with proper citation provided in print or electronic publication. No part of the transcripts or recordings may be used for commercial purposes without the written permission of the Stanford University Archivist or his/her representative. Requests for commercial use should be addressed to [email protected] and should indicate the items to be used, extent of usage, and purpose.
This oral history should be cited as “Richard W. Cottle, Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program Interviews (SC0932). Department of Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.”
8 Abstract
In the first of two interviews with Kandis Scott, Richard W. “Dick” Cottle gives a brief account of his birth in Chicago and education in neighboring Oak Park, Illinois. He reflects on his undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics: first at Harvard and then (after a two-year interlude of prep-school mathematics teaching) at the University of California, Berkeley where he had the good fortune of working at the Radiation Laboratory and the Operations Research Center with George Dantzig. Cottle relates how upon completion of his doctoral studies, he took a position at Bell Telephone Laboratories for two years, accepted a one-year visiting faculty position with Stanford’s Operations Research Program, and became a member of the tenure-line faculty when the OR Program became the Department of Operations Research. He talks about his rise through the academic ranks, his collaboration with George Dantzig (who had left Berkeley and joined Stanford), the formation of the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Program, the anti-Viet Nam War turbulence, his receipt of the U.S. Senior Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and eventual chairmanship of the OR Department. He discusses the merger of the OR Department with the Engineering-Economic Systems Department and a second merger four years later with the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management.
The second interview returns to the formation of the OR Department, its nature, its chairs, and the contemporaneous deans of the School of Engineering. Cottle recounts stories about his own chairmanship (which ended when the first of the two mergers occurred) and some of the challenges faced by the department. He also talks about events on campus, some of his closest friends on the Stanford faculty, and the effect that international recognition for his scholarly work had on his life at Stanford. He relates how he became involved with the writing of the book Stanford Street Names and other book projects. Responding to interviewer Kandis Scott’s questions, Cottle reflects on changes in the university, his sense of the most notable accomplishments of his career, and the challenges he faces going forward. The interview closes with comments on the influence of his family life.
9
10 Richard W. “Dick” Cottle Biography
Richard W. “Dick” Cottle, Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus, is known for his work on the linear complementarity problem and other areas of operations research. Cottle joined Stanford as an Acting Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering in 1966 and retired from the Management Science and Engineering Department (MS&E) in 2005.
Cottle was born in Chicago in 1934 to Charles and Rachel Cottle. He attended elementary and high school in Oak Park, Illinois, graduating from Oak Park-River Forest High School. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Harvard. During the Sputnik era, Cottle was inspired to teach secondary-level mathematics. He taught for two years at the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts before deciding to pursue doctoral studies in geometry at the University of California at Berkeley.
While at Berkeley, Cottle worked part-time as a computer programmer in the Radiation Laboratory. It was through his work at the Rad Lab that Cottle learned about linear and quadratic programming and the contributions of George Dantzig and Philip Wolfe. Soon thereafter he joined Dantzig’s team at Berkeley’s Operations Research Center (ORC) and completed his PhD in 1964 under Dantzig’s tutelage. Cottle’s work at ORC led to his first research contribution: the symmetric duality theory of quadratic programming. He then formulated what he called the “composite problem’’ of quadratic and more generally nonlinear programming. Abstracting from this, he conceived what was first called “the fundamental problem’’ and later named “the complementarity problem.’’ An important special case of the complementarity problem called “the linear complementarity problem’’ (LCP) became a major theme in Cottle’s research activity.
In 1966, after a short stint working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, Cottle joined Stanford’s Program in Operations Research as an Acting
11 Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1969 and full Professor in 1973. Cottle collaborated closely with his mentor George Dantzig (who had moved from Berkeley to Stanford in 1966) on research and administrative matters and at the Systems Optimization Laboratory (SOL). Cottle chaired the Operations Research Department from 1990 to 1996 and served as the associate chair of the Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research Department (EES & OR) after the merger of the two departments. In 2000, EES & OR merged again, this time with the Industrial Engineering & Engineering Management Department to form Management Science and Engineering (MS&E). In addition to these departmental affiliations, Cottle has worked with the Undergraduate Program in Mathematical and Computational Sciences since its creation in 1975.
Four sabbatical leaves offered Cottle special opportunities to concentrate on research. During the 1970-1971 academic year which he spent at Harvard and MIT, Cottle produced one of his most frequently cited papers “Manifestations of the Schur Complement.’’ On a sabbatical leave at ETH Zurich in 1972, Cottle began writing his most significant publication: The Linear Complementarity Problem, a comprehensive text/reference. Two of his gifted doctoral students, Jong-Shi Pang and Richard E. Stone, joined him in completing this work, which was awarded the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 1994. In 2009 the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics published a revised edition in its Classics in Applied Mathematics series.
Cottle spent the 1978-1979 academic year at the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne as a recipient of the U.S. Senior Scientist Award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Bonn, Germany. This research year led to the paper “Observations on a Class of Nasty Linear Complementarity Problems’’ and the development of Cottle’s interest in the problem of minimal triangulations of the n-cube. His final sabbatical leave was as Arthur Andersen Distinguished Visitor at the University of Cambridge Judge Institute of Management Studies in 2002. At
12 this time, Cottle edited a collection of papers called The Basic George B. Dantzig (Stanford University Press, 2003).
During his nearly 40-year career at Stanford, Cottle organized many conferences and served on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals, most notably as editor in chief (1980-1985) of the MPS journal, Mathematical Programming. From 1973 to 1976, Cottle served as Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS) Executive Committee.
Cottle is also interested in historical writing. He began writing the booklet Stanford Street Names: A Pocket Guide in 1992. Work on that project led to his association with the Stanford Historical Society, which published the first edition of the work in 2005 and a revised and updated edition in 2014. Cottle became a member of the Board of Directors of the Stanford Historical Society in 2012. In addition to work on Stanford history, Cottle has written historical articles on the field of mathematical programming (optimization).
In retirement, Cottle has continued his scholarly activities. In 2006, he became a fellow of INFORMS. He has also written Linear and Nonlinear Optimization in collaboration with Mukund N. Thapa. The textbook is expected to appear in 2016. Retirement has also enabled Cottle to enjoy his favorite hobbies: woodworking and maintaining his large collection of cacti and succulents. Cottle is married to Suzanne Covich, both a fellow music lover and a one-time denizen of Oak Park. They have two children, Corinne and David.
13 14 S T A N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
PROJECT: STANFORD FACULTY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
INTERVIEWER: KANDIS SCOTT
INTERVIEWEE: RICHARD W. COTTLE
DATE OF INTERVIEW: AUGUST 05, 2015
Scott: Kandis Scott is interviewing Richard W. Cottle, Emeritus Professor of
Operations Research, in his office in the Management Science and
Engineering Department on August 5, 2015.
Where were you born?
Cottle: [00:00:06] I was born in Chicago in 1934. I grew up there. My parents moved
from the city of Chicago after about five years, to the suburb of Oak Park,
which is directly west of Chicago--directly west of the Loop, in fact. That’s
where I went to elementary school and high school.
Scott: Did you have siblings?
Cottle: [00:00:42] No. Well, my mother gave birth to a stillborn child about a year
and a half before I was born. I was all they managed to produce. She was
actually already 34 years old, which, at that time, was kind of old. No, I’m an
only child.
Scott: I know you went off to Harvard. How did you find your way East from that
good midwestern beginning?
Cottle: [00:01:28] It was my father’s idea. By the way, you might be interested to
know that my mother never went to high school. My father did go to high
15 school and did attend some college but did not get a college degree. They still
had a lot of respect for education, and they thought that I could apply to
Harvard. I applied to Harvard and Yale. Those were the only two schools I
applied to. I got into both. What more can I say?
Scott: Did you like it in the East?
Cottle: [00:02:28] I loved the East, but I had a very unhappy time at Harvard,
primarily because my father died during the summer after my freshman year.
My mother was left in a somewhat tight financial state. My father was well
paid, I guess, but not a rich man by any means. There were a number of
difficulties with his family that made life very miserable for my mother, and
that reflected a lot on me. After my sophomore year, my mother moved to
Cambridge, and I moved home with her as kind of an economy measure, and
I lived there while I was finishing my undergraduate degree. [00:03:53] Then
I stayed for another year and got a master’s degree. That’s a little Harvard
history.
Scott: What made you turn West?
Cottle: [00:04:08] I decided when I was at Harvard that I wasn’t really sure that I
wanted to go through with the doctoral program there. I got a job teaching in
a prep school in Concord, Massachusetts. This is called Middlesex School—
[a] beautiful, beautiful place where I taught mathematics, naturally, because
that was my major.
Perhaps I ought to come back to the point that when I went off to
college, I had aspirations of becoming a medical doctor. That was something
that was promoted pretty much by my parents. I also had a fallback position,
16 and that was to go into foreign service. [00:05:15] I was interested in
languages or so I thought. I majored actually in what Harvard calls
Government, not Political Science. They don’t call it Political Science but
they call it Government, and I suppose, in a way, that’s indicative of where
they think people who study that are going to go. It was only a little bit later
in my freshman year that I took up mathematics. As it happens, I had done
very badly in mathematics in my senior year of high school in the last
semester. The worst grade I ever got in high school came in this math course.
The teacher said to me privately, “If you take any more mathematics in
college, be sure to repeat this course.” That was how it was. I was intimidated
and, at the same time though, I had a dorm mate who was very enthusiastic
about his math course.
[00:06:50] It was just first year calculus. It wasn’t any big deal. I sat
down with him and started looking at the material that he was learning. At
the time, it was just analytic geometry, which is pretty simple. I said to
myself, “Well I think I can do this pretty well. Why don’t I just take the
course next semester?” I did so and really liked it a lot and did well in
it...better than anything else I had done at Harvard to date. I changed my
major and changed my focus entirely. I don’t think this pleased my parents a
great deal. [00:07:37] My mother then began advocating applied mathematics
because she wanted me to be gainfully employed. She was a very practical
woman. I kept that thought, but I was studying pure mathematics from start
to finish. I liked it.
Scott: So you went to teach mathematics at Middlesex?
17 Cottle: [00:08:18] Yes, I went to teach mathematics in this prep school. My mother
was also rather strongly opposed to my being in the military, which was a real
threat at the time. It was, I don’t know, Korean War or something like that,
and one could get a deferment or an exemption or whatever they called it by
having critical skills, and teaching was one of them. This was just after
Sputnik and so there was a lot of emphasis on science and mathematics. That
was for me. And I did that for one year. I have to say I didn’t care for
teaching adolescent boys. I liked the teaching of the math, but I didn’t care
for the behavior of the boys. It was a boys’ boarding school at that time. It’s
now become coeducational.
[00:09:35] I was all set to leave that school after one year, and the headmaster
encouraged me to give it another year, saying that I might like it better. I did
so, but by that time, I was already thinking of doctoral studies.
I made a bunch of applications to doctoral programs; the places I
applied to were Wisconsin and Illinois and California. I was going to go to a
public institution because it would be less expensive. Also I should mention
as a very, very important fact that after one year at this prep school, I got
married.
My wife, Sue, as it turns out, is a graduate of the same elementary
school and high school that I went to and someone that I knew for a long
time.
[00:10:56] We only got together as a romantic interest, you might say,
when she came to Harvard Summer School just after I’d finished my master’s
degree. I was doing a little bit of, I don’t know, course assistance or
18 something like that--grading papers, doing whatever I could to earn a little
money in that summer. I was all set to go off to this boarding school then.
Her parents were friends of my parents. You might think that that’s a perfect
recipe for avoidance and all of that, [laughter] but it turned out otherwise.
We had a lot of things in common. Her mother had written to my mother
and asked if I would be kind enough to introduce her [Sue] to some of my
friends.
[00:12:11] I didn’t have a tremendous number of friends to begin
with, and none of them were around in the summertime. I took over the job
myself and found it quite likeable. By the following Thanksgiving or so, we
were engaged and married the following June.1
Scott: What was she studying?
Cottle: [00:12:42] What was she studying? She was studying music at Michigan. Her
intention was to become a musicologist. She’s also a violinist and can play
viola and piano. Those are the three instruments that she can play. A big part
of our common interest was classical music. In fact, during the summer when
she was at Harvard Summer School, she took a course in Beethoven’s string
quartets, which I heard quite a bit of [laughter] during that summer. After we
got married, we spent that first year of our marriage at Middlesex School. I
was in the process of applying to [graduate] schools.
I was also applying for jobs at the schools or near the schools or
something like that. [00:13:58] One of the things that happened was just so
fortuitous--I applied to the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory to be
1 The day after we were married, we headed off to Ann Arbor so that Sue could finish her undergraduate
19 a programmer. I did not get that job. They just turned me down. However, on the very last day that we were there in Concord at Middlesex School, I attended a faculty meeting that I could very well have skipped; but I attended the faculty meeting because I thought it was my duty. This was an evaluation of the students and their placement in the classes the next year. All of a sudden, while I was at this meeting, there came a phone call from the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory asking me if I would like a job as a programmer.
[00:15:12] I said “yes, that would be great but I’ve already committed myself to a summer teaching position at USC and I won’t be able to start until September,” to which the answer was “OK, fine.” I got there in the
Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, and I got this job as a computer programmer. Now you have to understand that I knew nothing about computer programming [laughter] at the time...nothing. I was framed as a mathematician, and that was at least one thing in my favor. At some point along the way, I was assigned to debug a computer program that had been written by a student. This computer program was to solve what are called linear and quadratic programming problems.
[00:16:32] Now that was another subject I knew nothing about. My approach to that was to go out and get a book to find out what linear and quadratic programming are all about. In those days, there weren’t many books on that subject. Of course, the library had some things--and I managed to buy my own copy of a book on linear programming and started reading it and [I] found it very interesting. I had heard of linear programming
20 before. I should say I took an economics course when I was a senior and there was some reference made to it in that course. I had quite an interest in this.
[00:17:36] It seemed to me as though this was an area of applied mathematics which didn’t involve certain aspects of applied math that I didn’t care for, and it did involve geometry which I loved. I thought, “This is going to be very nice. I’ll really go into this.” While I was reading this book, I learned the name George Dantzig. George Dantzig [is] known as the father of linear programming. I also learned about a man named Philip Wolfe who had written about quadratic programming. It was all [covered] in the same book [that I had bought.]
There’s another little chapter here that fits in really beautifully.
[00:18:42] That is, one day my wife and I were parked on Shattuck Avenue in
Berkeley, and our car had on it a little sticker, a decal that was from Harvard.
It was a parking permit. We came back to the car and there was a note on the windshield. It said, “I noticed that you have a Harvard parking sticker. I’m a
Harvard graduate also. Would you be interested in getting together?” In my day and age, Harvard guys just didn’t do things like that. [laughter] We did get together with him and his wife and it turned out that we and they had young daughters and we became a sort of a foursome and the kids played together. It was all very lovely. [00:19:52] One day he (the man who had left the note) and I were having lunch together underneath the Campanile--I’ll never forget it--a brown bag lunch--and we’re talking about what we’re doing. I’m telling him about how I’m debugging this linear and quadratic
21 programming code at the Radiation Laboratory. He said to me, “Well, did you know that George Dantzig is now here at Cal?” I did not. Dantzig was in the Industrial Engineering Department. I was in the Math Department--[in] two separate schools. He said, “Furthermore, he’s looking for graduate students. [00:20:41] They have an Operations Research Center that they’re just starting out, and he’s looking for graduate students.” That sounded great to me because the place where I was working at the time when I was having this lunch with him was essentially a firetrap. It was a loft over a huge computer. In those days, computers were mammoth. We were kind of a buffer between the computer and the ceiling. When it got hot in that place, it was hot. You could only use fans to cool tapes. You couldn’t use them to cool yourself. [laughter]
[00:21:42] Those were the rules. I thought maybe I should go and have a meeting with Dantzig and find out if he would like me to work for him. God bless him, he was interested and hired me as a programmer--not as a research assistant but as a programmer. The thinking was that he could pay me a little bit more as a programmer, even though I still was largely ignorant of the art. He put me to work on a problem or two. I won’t go into the details of that. Suffice it to say that this combination of very lucky events led to where I am today, led to my doctoral dissertation. I did my thesis with
Dantzig.
[00:22:53] That required a certain amount of administrative fiddle-de- de because he was in a separate department and I had [to have] an advisor of record who was in the Math Department. Luckily, there was a person in the
22 Math Department who was familiar with linear programming and subjects
related to it, and he did the job. Dantzig was really the, you might say, de
facto thesis advisor, and I was his first PhD student.
Scott: I want to catch up one thing that we kind of skipped over and then I’d like to
pick up where you were talking about working with Dantzig, your advisor.
We sort of skipped over how you chose to come to Berkeley of all of those
schools. Was that because of the jobs that you had offered? You had
mentioned all the jobs.
Cottle: [00:24:12] I think that one of the reasons. In the first place, turns out that
Berkeley had a rating at that time [as] the best math department in the
country. Princeton people would contest this vigorously and Harvard ones as
well and MIT and so forth. I was interested in going to the West Coast. That
was one thing. That’s not nearly as frivolous as the other reason [which] is
that I was aware of a night club in San Francisco called the Black Hawk
where a particular musician played. I had recordings of this musician’s work.
Scott: Who was it?
Cottle: [00:25:16] It was a man by the name of Cal Tjader, and he played vibes. I
wanted to be able to go to the Black Hawk to hear him from time to time.
We went once, and that was enough. I just didn’t like the atmosphere, the
whole thing. I was very happy to be at Cal. It was very different from
Harvard I thought. Of course, the times were different. The atmosphere was
very, very different. There was a lot more interaction between people--
[between] students and [between] students and faculty--than I had
experienced at Harvard. That was good.
23 Scott: To jump back to you were talking about your connection with Dantzig. I’d
like to move toward operations research--the math to operations research
and then ultimately to Stanford. If you could get into that.
Cottle: [00:26:46] The story evolves in that way which I’m about to relate to you. I
spent four years at Cal. I would say that about three and a half of those were
working with Dantzig. One of the things that I did with Dantzig, apart from
my own research and kind of phantom programming, was to help with the
editorial work--maybe proofreading is a better word for it--[on] a textbook
that he was writing and published in 1963. I was the head proofreader of a
team of people who were reading big, long galley sheets at the time. That
brought me pretty close to him for just that kind of work.
[00:27:59] I knew that I was going to be finishing in June and I
started interviewing. I had a couple of interviews. I should say that in the
summer of 1963, I had a consulting job at the Rand Corporation2, which was
wonderful, and I really wanted to go back there. I wanted to go back to that
research environment. Incidentally, as a graduate student, I never did any
teaching. None at all. I was just this kind of programmer but doing research
assistant sort of work. I wrote a few papers. I published a couple of things
and did no teaching. Anyway, the Rand Corporation being a place where I
thought I could continue my research was very attractive to me.
[00:29:18] I wanted to do that, but I didn’t get the job. They had one
job in the Math Department there and they gave it to a real mathematician
from Princeton. My second best choice was Bell Laboratories. Bell
2 The person with whom I worked there was Philip Wolfe, mentioned earlier in connection with quadratic programming.
24 Laboratories is a very big place. They had a lot of different sites. I wanted to
be at the one where the math research was done up in Murray Hill.
Scott: Where is Murray Hill? New Jersey?
Cottle: [00:29:59] It’s near Summit, New Jersey. I interviewed there but the offer
that I got from Bell Laboratories was to work in Holmdel. Now Holmdel is
down near Red Bank. I don’t know if you’re familiar with New Jersey but
Holmdel is sort of central, [a] little closer to the coast. Not quite as far south
as Asbury Park, for example, or those places. [But] it was within an hour’s
drive of Princeton. That was good. I think I can say that I was not at all
happy at Bell Labs.
I wasn’t happy in New Jersey and I wasn’t happy at Bell Labs either.
It just didn’t quite cut it for me. Fortunately, I was able to continue my
research work there, even though their expectations were for something else.
[00:31:26] [laughter] I should say--and this is an important point--that prior
to going to Bell Labs, while I was still working with Dantzig, I was up at his
house one day and told him that I had this offer from Bell Laboratories and
they’re really kind of pressuring me to say yes or no, trying to evoke from
him some sort of response of encouragement, discouragement, what have
you. What he said to me was almost inscrutable: “One is tempted by the
offers he has in hand.” That was all he said. I didn’t press him any further
because, you know, I was kind of intimidated. Ultimately I took that job.
When he found out about that, he was not at all happy with me. [00:33:04]
About three weeks after I had accepted the job, there came a call from
Princeton: would I like to have a job in the Math Department as an
25 instructor. The salary that I was to get from Bell Labs was exactly double
what Princeton was going to pay, although it was for twelve months versus
nine. I felt as though I could not in any way accept the position at Princeton
having accepted the one at Bell Labs. [So] I went to Bell Labs. By the way,
there were some reasons for not going to Princeton because the job would
not have been tenure track. It was an instructorship. [00:34:14] Not only that
but I’m certain that I would have been a third-class citizen there at best and I
wasn’t quite ready for that. I explained very politely to the people at
Princeton that I just couldn’t do it and they understood.
I spent [two] years at Bell Labs. After the first year--well during that
first year, I got a call from Stanford, from Jerry Lieberman [Gerald J.
Lieberman]: “Would [you] like to come out for an interview and with the
possibility of being here for a year as a visitor?” He put it that way. I came
out. Getting such an appointment would, in those days--and this is kind of an
important point of history, of Stanford history--Operations Research was a
program [not a department]. It was a PhD program in which there were six
academic units participating, at least on paper. One of them was Industrial
Engineering. [00:35:52] Another was Statistics. Another one was Economics.
Another was Computer Science. Another was Mathematics and the last one
was the Business School. Altogether, there were six departments and three
separate deans, a rather unworkable arrangement.
Scott: What year was this?
Cottle: [00:36:16] This was the year 1965. The program began in 1962. When I came
out, in order to have an appointment there, it was necessary for one of these
26 six departments to say, “Yes, we’ll give you a half-time billet” (or something
like that) because you had to be [appointed in] one of those departments. I
was hoping it was going to be Computer Science, believe it or not. It turned
out that the one that seemed the most workable was Industrial Engineering,
but they didn’t really want to take me on. The chair at the time, I am told,
said that he didn’t want any mathematicians in his department. [laughter] It
fell through. The next year...
Scott: May I interrupt? Why were you interested in computer programming and not
the math component?
Cottle: [00:37:44] I knew that Math was out of the question. In fact, I don’t even
think I had an interview over there. I did have one in Computer Science
[with Gene Golub]. I had one also with Ingram Olkin, who had a joint
appointment in Statistics and the School of Education. You see statistics is
taught all over the place. School of Education is one such place. Then, of
course, there was Industrial Engineering. The Business School was, I think,
pretty much out and Economics was definitely out.
Scott: And Prof. Lieberman was in what department?
Cottle: [00:38:48] He was in Industrial Engineering and Statistics. Those were the
places where I had some reasonable interviews but neither one was ready for
it then. Then a year passed and they invited me again, as a visitor. It turned
out that the position that I had was acting assistant professor--acting assistant
professor of Industrial Engineering. Now that was the same kind of a job
that graduate students would have but that was OK. I was delighted to be
27 back in California. Then [during that academic year] they made me an offer,
but so did Berkeley.
Scott: Stanford made you a tenure track offer? Is that what you mean? Or the
acting assistant position?
Cottle: [00:39:57] The assistant professorship--real one--after I had been here for a
year or during my first year here. It was the 1966-1967 academic year. In that
year, I got an offer from Stanford but I also got an offer from Cal, not from
the Math Department but from the Industrial Engineering Department. I’m
not sure of this [name]. By that time, it may have been called Industrial
Engineering and Operations Research at Berkeley. They became that--when
exactly, I don’t remember. I had these two offers. Quite frankly, I was more
interested at the time in Cal than I was in Stanford. Why? For one thing, I
guess I was a little concerned about Dantzig’s shadow and being in it.
Scott: But he was at Cal?
Cottle: [00:41:13] No, but he was now here. I forgot to mention that very important
point. In 1966, when I came out to Stanford, he came to Stanford also from
Cal. He had his own reasons and the fact that I was brought in may or may
not be because of him, I don’t know. I’ve never actually seen the paperwork
that goes along with this so I just don’t know. Here I was. My mentor
became my colleague. Of course, we were friendly. That helped too.
Scott: You said you were more interested in Cal.
Cottle: [00:42:06] I was more interested in Cal. For one thing, I thought Cal had a
much better library, which I think is true. I didn’t want to be in his shadow. I
28 wanted to make my own mark and so forth. The women folk in my family
prevailed on me and I chose to come to Stanford.
Scott: Why did they prefer Stanford?
Cottle: [00:42:44] There was a lot of turmoil [in Berkeley]--you remember I got my
PhD in 1964. This was the year of the Free Speech Movement and all the
turmoil at Cal. It was more turbulence than they cared to be part of and then
they were also concerned about educational issues for the children--busing.
They were fearful of that. They thought that, you know, everything is so
close at hand here at Stanford, it would be really beautiful. And it was. I
chose to come to Stanford.
Scott: May I pause a moment because this feels like a nice place to interrupt you. At
some point and it seems to me--correct me--perhaps your work with Dantzig
who was in OR and then your experience at Bell Labs kind of made you
attractive not as a pure mathematician or were you a pure mathematician but
also in Industrial Engineering. It seems both Cal and Stanford saw you in
that kind of world. Can you clarify how you moved out of pure math into
operations research ultimately?
Cottle: [00:44:25] The operation that Dantzig was running at Berkeley when I was a
PhD student was called the Operations Research Center. If you look to your
right over there, you’ll see a photograph of the building where--and you’ll
notice the chain link fence and the barbed wire up on the top. There’s a
whole story behind that. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what
operations research did but rather what was done in that building before we
29 got there. I was kind of involved in Operations Research as a graduate
student.
[00:45:16] I even applied for a master’s degree--while I was a doctoral
student, I applied for a master’s in Operations Research at Cal thinking that
because I was taking some courses that I qualified. To their credit, they
turned me down on that saying I didn’t take enough [of them]. That was OK.
Operations Research was familiar to me and I was in an operations research
department of sorts at Bell Labs. Actually it was called the Outside Plant
Systems Engineering Division or Center--Center was the word they used. A
center is an organization that includes a lot of departments and the
departments include groups and so on...very structured. That’s where I was
sitting.
Scott: You had been moving your mathematics towards operations research. I see.
Cottle: [00:46:27] Right. Now there’s a little nuance here that I think is worth
mentioning. That is reflected in this title of a journal. You see what it says,
“Mathematics of Operations Research.” That was the kind of thing that we
thought we were doing in this department. In fact, this journal was founded
by a colleague from this department, not Dantzig.
Scott: At Stanford?
Cottle: [00:47:10] Here, yes. Of course, it’s an international journal but it was
founded by Pete Veinott [Arthur F. Veinott Jr.] who used to occupy this
office with me, although he passed away, [a] couple-three years ago. The fact
that I was involved in operations research was not so much on the practical
and applied end but more on the mathematical end.
30 Scott: Not a big, dramatic change here. Take a moment and explain the times and
the terms of your coming to Stanford.
Cottle: [00:47:59] The times. It was 1966 when I arrived. I think the turmoil in
Berkeley was still ongoing. Then, of course, what can I say? There were the
flower children and all of that, something I had absolutely nothing to do
with. It was also a time of civil rights change, a lot of consciousness of that. I
was trying my best to be a scholar here at Stanford and a parent of two
children. One was born in 1960. They were born in Berkeley in 1960 and
1964. I was trying to be a good husband and parent.
Scott: And get tenure.
Cottle: [00:49:26] And get tenure. Very important. I was back to teaching which was
something that I thought I did well. I think that student evaluations might
have changed my mind on that point. I really did work at it. What else about
the times? Of course, there was the Vietnam conflict. I remember--I think it
was back in 1954--now this is going back some--that was around the time
when the French were getting kicked out of Indochina and I said to myself,
“Gosh, I hope the United States doesn’t get involved in that.” I noticed
when I was an undergraduate at Harvard that Henry Kissinger was teaching a
course there that had the nickname “rice paddies” and it was essentially
about Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and that part of the world.
[00:51:00] It was in the Government Department. This was probably
kind of a preparation for people who were going to be heading in that--not
as soldiers or military people but as policymakers and social thinkers and so
forth.
31 Anyway, there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on and I was just
working hard at getting tenure. Let’s see, I came in 1967 and I was given
credit for the time that I had spent in New Jersey at Bell Labs toward tenure,
which I think I got in 1969. I was promoted to associate professor in 1969.
You could check my CV. Then I became full professor in 1973. I was doing
pretty well. Of course, nowadays, one wouldn’t advance quite so easily or so
fast, but, in those days, it was OK.
[00:52:38] I remember that there was some kind of concern about my
teaching. There was a professor in what was then called the Applied
Mechanics Department. I don’t think we have that one anymore. I had given
a talk over there about an application of my line of research in mechanics
and he spoke up for me. The chair of that department had heard me in this
seminar or colloquium, whatever it was, and I think spoke up on my behalf
to say, “Yes, he can deliver a cogent lecture” or something like that. I don’t
know what he said. That was fortunate for me. Anyway, I became full
professor.
Scott: May I capture the moment that you have in that wonderful photo, that we’ll
talk about in a moment. I’d like you to talk about that department, which was
quite new at the time, and about the original faculty--you mentioned Harvey
Wagner and Ken Arrow being part of your start. Could you elaborate on the
very first beginnings of your career in OR here at Stanford?
Cottle: [00:54:20] Right. I hope I’m telling the truth in this. This is the way I
remember the story. Kenneth Arrow was part in the Operations Research
Department. Harvey Wagner had been in the Operations Research Program.
32 I think that he left around the time that it became a department. He went off to the University of North Carolina Business School. He, by the way, had a massive introductory operations research book, as did Hillier and Lieberman.
I can’t say that there was ill feeling about that but it was there. I mean, the books were there for sure. He went off and did his thing in North Carolina. I believe that Ken Arrow went off to Harvard at about that time and there was, of course, a gap in our teaching program.
[00:55:57] I think that’s where I was intended to fill in. Now the course that Arrow taught in our program, I can’t even remember what it was called, but it might have been something like Welfare Economics. You see, the kind of work that I do has something to do with equilibrium theory, which is one of many subjects for which Ken Arrow is famous. They probably thought that I could somehow or other fill in on that score. There’s another topic called non-linear programming, which he contributed to and is, in a way, part of mathematical economics, at least it’s used in mathematical economics. It was sort of natural because I had some credentials in that.
[00:57:18] I should explain that Operations Research and, for that matter, Engineering-Economic Systems were both graduate programs and initially just PhD programs. Then they added master’s programs. And so there was a lot of advising and teaching of master’s students to be done and that’s part of what I did. I did that kind of thing. Fortunately, Ken Arrow came back to Stanford. [laughter]
33 [00:58:25] I remember that I had a sabbatical leave around 1970-1971
or so and I went to Harvard and MIT for that and was able to audit an
equilibrium course of Arrow’s at Harvard. That was nice.
Scott: I guess that about the time that you came, the program was becoming a
department.
Cottle: [00:59:05] Yes. I came in 1966. It was still a program, but I think that what
made it acceptable to the chair of Industrial Engineering was the fact that he
knew that Operations Research was to become a department. This was not
something shared with me at the time that I came but he must have known
that he couldn’t be stuck with a mathematician for a long time because there
was going to be a separate department that would be stuck with him. See? So
it worked.
Scott: And the department was created in...?
Cottle: [00:59:52] In 1967. It was launched in September of 1967.
Scott: We’re now at Stanford and I would like you to talk about your Stanford
career and, with that of course, the Stanford Operations Research
Department. You’re going to start me off in 1967 when instead of being a
program, it became a department. Then I know from your work it’s been
reorganized and renamed several times with spinoffs and mergers. I’ll ask you
to walk me through those changes, maybe chronologically, and then maybe
set them in the larger context of the university’s changes or changes in
faculty. Let’s start with the beginning of the department in 1967. Who were
those people that you worked with or the important ones, I guess.
34 Cottle: [01:00:53] In their own way, they’re all important except maybe the guy on
the far right there [referring to the photo].
Scott: Referring to himself too modestly.
Cottle: [01:01:08] Let me say that certainly the star of the ball is Kenneth Arrow and
maybe another star is George Dantzig. Then there’s Rudolf Kálmán who
didn’t stay very long. I think his appointment was a joint one anyway but he’s
very, very famous worldwide for a lot of different things but perhaps
something known as the Kálmán filter, which I won’t attempt to explain.
Then there’s Pete Veinott there and Don Iglehart, Fred Hillier. That’s a small
group of people. Let’s see, altogether it looks like maybe eight or nine.
[01:02:23] Oh, there’s Alan Manne in there. He’s an economist but an
economist who does a kind of computing. He’s no longer living, I should
add. Passed away the same year that George Dantzig did, which was 2005.
At any rate, I think it’s safe to say that at the time of its formation,
this department was thought to be the best in the country, maybe the world.
Now, this was being a big fish in a very small pond but there were some very
strong competitors in other places such as MIT and Cornell and Berkeley.
One thing is for sure and that is that George Dantzig’s departure
from Berkeley and coming to Stanford shifted things considerably, although
Berkeley had a person by the name of David Gale, who was both a
mathematician and an economist, and very well-known and highly respected
and a wonderful teacher and advisor, I would say. Berkeley didn’t do too
badly. [01:04:19] They lost George Dantzig. George Dantzig was a person
who had a lot of research grants and contracts.
35 Scott: From whom? Who was funding this kind of work?
Cottle: [01:04:39] There was the National Science Foundation. There was the Air
Force. There was the Office of Naval Research, just to name three. There
may have been some others, maybe, for example, Electric Power Research
Institute or IBM. These kinds of corporations or organizations may also have
sponsored research and supported students, which was the name of the
game. The department was riding very high for quite a while. I can’t really
say--of course, Kálmán left. Arrow left for a while. Even Alan Manne left for
a while. He went back to Harvard for a while. His wife was not happy there
in Cambridge and they returned to Stanford. [01:06:05] Previously he had
had a joint appointment in Economics and Operations Research but upon
his return, it became entirely Operations Research.
Scott: With these relatively few faculty was this only a graduate program or was this
an undergraduate major also?
Cottle: [01:06:29] It was always, as a department, it was always a graduate program.
And now I must introduce another element. Around 1975 or so, give or take
a year, there was formed something called the undergraduate program in
mathematical science or mathematical and computational science. It now
goes by the name--acronym, MCS. It’s Math and Comp Sci. There are
components or shall we say faculty and departmental affiliations with math,
computer science, statistics and operations research or nowadays,
Management Science and Engineering.
[01:07:33] Operations Research was a big component of that
undergraduate program when it started and it’s been very successful ever
36 since. Here you have an example of a kind of collaborative venture where the
department was not trying to duplicate something that some other
department was doing. There was this entity that it contributed to--the
undergraduate program-- but it wasn’t taking on an undergraduate program
of its own because the philosophy in Operations Research was that we would
prefer that our graduate students, our master’s students and particularly PhD
students, be trained in mathematics and statistics and computer science.
[01:08:50] All these things are present in that undergraduate program.
You see? That is the foundation upon which all this other stuff is built.
Scott: Did the original people--were you good colleagues? Was there bickering? Did
people fight over money? Were there personality problems? Small
departments can have advantages and disadvantages.
Cottle: [01:09:26] I would say that the department suffered from an excess of
harmony. [laughter] Really. There was very little turnover.
Scott: Well people left.
Cottle: [01:09:43] Some left but they came back. Right? It turned out that there
became--this is now toward the eighties or so--there became a demographic
problem, mainly too many old folks and no junior people. As they say, too
many chiefs and no Indians. That’s not a popular saying these days but you
get the idea. All full professors. No junior professors. No plan for
succession. That, I would say, was an issue for quite a while.
Scott: An issue for whom?
Cottle: [01:10:50] Well it must have been on the mind of the dean for one thing.
Scott: Now which dean?
37 Cottle: [01:10:55] Dean of Engineering. Oh, I don’t know that I made this clear to
you. The program in Operations Research had three deans to report to. One
of the soul searching issues or problems that people faced--I was not one of
them--but the question was should this new department be in H&S?
Scott: What’s H&S?
Cottle: [01:11:30] Humanities and Science. Should it be in the business school?
Should it be in Engineering? All right. These different schools have different
outlooks about various things like, for example, soft money and so forth and
expectations. The Department of Operations Research was launched within
the School of Engineering. The dean at the time was Joe Pettit [Joseph Mayo
Pettit] I believe. Joe Pettit, who subsequently went to Georgia Tech. Yes.
Scott: Who made that decision? Did the people in the OR Department have a
viewpoint as to where they wanted to be? Can you elaborate a little bit on
that decision?
Cottle: [01:12:41] Only a very little bit. I think that the people who may have had
opinions and made decisions were at a higher level. Remember I was just a
junior person at the time. I may have heard discussions. By the way, I spoke
about excess of harmony. I think that almost every day of every week was a
department meeting, well in the sense that we all went to lunch together.
There was a time when we could almost pack everybody into one car and
there was a strong preference to go off campus. We did that. There was a lot
of discussion about departmental matters every day. We sorted a lot of stuff
out, I think.
38 Scott: Did you get any sense from those conversations as to what the members of
the department preferred?
Cottle: [01:13:54] Yes, I must have and I think that they probably preferred
Engineering. I mean, they may have had some misgivings. Lieberman, the
chair--he was chair of the program and chair of the department for a good,
long time. He was in two schools himself. He was in H&S with Statistics and
Engineering with Industrial Engineering. He was knowledgeable about both.
I guess if I had been asked my own preference, I probably would have said
H&S. But I certainly wasn’t asked, I think, and I was very possibly wrong
about that.
Scott: Now we have this newly created department under the dean of engineering
serving graduate level students with substantial funding. Am I capturing
pieces of what the beginning was?
Cottle: [01:15:26] I think that’s true. Maybe it became a little more substantial a bit
later, but--in the seventies, not the late sixties, but the seventies. I’m afraid I
can’t say anything about the levels [of funding] of those because I just don’t
know them. I don’t remember them. I’m not sure I ever studied them. One
thing I am sure of and that is toward the end they dwindled to practically
nothing.
Scott: Well let’s move forward then. What’s the merger or spinoff that comes next
and when was that?
Cottle: [01:16:18] Let’s see. I have to stop and think about this. I became department
chair in 1990 and the dean at the time was Jim Gibbons [James F. Gibbons].
I remember quite clearly--I have to digress just a little here--the School of
39 Engineering, at least then and probably still--has what is called the executive
council. The executive council is made up of all the department chairs and
the dean and maybe other associate deans or officials of the school. They
meet, I guess, monthly or so. They consider appointments, policy, et cetera.
[01:17:32] They also occasionally run a retreat. I remember attending
one of those retreats. It was during the summer and it was held up at the
NBER--the National Bureau of Economic Research. It’s up near the Center
for Behavioral Sciences.
Scott: Oh, I know where that is.
Cottle: [01:17:57] Up there on the hill. We’re at this thing and each department chair
is asked to give a little kind of overview of the department and so on. I
remember giving a talk about Operations Research and how we had this
demographic imbalance and so on. Anyway, then there came a question
period. I must say, I really got kind of blindsided or sandbagged or
something when one of the department chairs--it was Joe Goodman of
Electrical Engineering--asked me, “Why should there be three departments
all doing the same thing?” Those departments, of course, he was referring to
were Operations Research, Engineering-Economic Systems, and Industrial
Engineering. From his vantage point, all three departments were doing the
same sort of stuff so why should there be three departments.
[01:19:24] I had to give my take on why there were three
departments, why there should be three departments, but it would have been
much better if I had been prepared for that kind of a question. This was
essentially my first experience at such a gathering. It might even have been
40 labeled as a boot camp for new department chairs or something. I don’t
know. I gave it what I considered to be the answer and I tried to explain that
they do different things, that they have different takes on what they do, that
they have different policies with respect to the support of and education of
doctoral students particularly, and differences in research funding, et cetera.
[01:20:39] That was my response to that [question.] That, I think in a
way, was the opening salvo for a pressure to merge and condense. It was also
in that time period when the financial well-being of Operations Research was
not particularly healthy. This was now the nineties, the early nineties.
Scott: Before you go to that, which is very important, when we talked earlier, I
thought you gave some very helpful and brief distinctions between
Engineering-Economic Systems and OR. You talked about theory and
practice. You talked about PhDs and where graduate students worked and
the relationship there. Could you explain that again please?
Cottle: [01:21:57] Sure. As I think I’ve indicated earlier, for the most part,
Operations Research was concerned with the mathematics of operations
research. What would this mean? You have a technique like linear
programming, for instance, Dantzig’s big contribution. Now people study
ways of making the methodology handle larger problems more efficiently,
studying properties of the functions and sets involved that enhance or are
intended to enhance computational or, for that matter, other theoretical
investigations and so forth. That was the kind of thing that we were engaged
in.
41 [01:23:23] Now there are also people whose primary activity is the application of these things to real world problems. When you get into real world problems, you have to realize that some of the mathematical models that we use in operations research are idealizations of real world situations and sometimes those have to be massaged a bit or tailored or something in order to make use of them in the real world. This is not only because the data of the problem may be kind of fuzzy or uncertain or what have you, but that the way things are actually done isn’t exactly according to the way it’s envisioned in the idealized model.
[01:24:45] Some people would be looking at those kinds of application issues but then there are people who might, for instance, be studying some economic problem--I say economic problem in a pretty broad sense--and they look at the description of it that may be in some very non- symbolic and maybe verbal terms and try to create a model, a mathematical model, mathematizing it, if you will, so that it can be studied more abstractly.
You could lay out a kind of a picture of something. I’ll give you a very, very simpleminded kind of analogy here. If we’re talking about rectangles, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot exactly what the lengths of the sides are.
[01:26:25] It is of interest to know when the sides--adjacent sides-- have equal length, yes, but beyond that, a rectangle is a rectangle or a circle is a circle. It’s that kind of abstraction taken from maybe a verbal statement or even some mathematical statement, some description, that becomes of interest to a person say who studies the mathematics of operations research.
There may, along the way, be another person who has made this abstraction
42 from the model or from the description, the verbal, whatever. We have a
kind of division of labor, if you like, that, in a way I would think, sort of
typifies the work of the different departments. Now I’m being a little...
simplistic here.
Scott: OR would lean toward the theoretical. Is that it? And the EES towards the
practical application?
Cottle: [01:27:53] In EES, for example, I’ll just give you--you have a man by the
name of Jim Sweeney. You know Susan Sweeney perhaps? Jim Sweeney is
head of the Stanford Campus Residential Leaseholders. He was chair of EES
at the time that I was chair of OR and then he became chair of the merged
departments and I became the associate chair. In any event, he is an energy
economist. There are lots of issues pertaining to energy that he would work
with. Some of these are mathematical. Then there are other people--there’s a
guy by the name of John P. Weyant who’s actually a research professor I
think. He’s not a tenure line professor. In any event, he does energy research.
[01:29:18] He was a member of the Engineering-Economic Systems
department. Let’s take Industrial Engineering. Now Industrial Engineering at
Stanford is very different from industrial engineering [departments] around
the country. Classical industrial engineering involves things like time and
motion studies, foundry work, plant layout, those kinds of topics. Not all of
those things were done by our Industrial Engineering Department because it
was--I think it’s safe to say--more oriented toward service industries than
manufacturing industries, not that they were excluding manufacturing. But
43 I’ll give you one example of--there’s a woman by the name of Margaret
Brandeau.
[01:30:48] A lot of her work has to do with health, health services and
policy. There are people who, for example, study issues pertaining to organ
transplants. Lots of practical, you might say understandable activities and
topics that are definitely real world stuff. Those are not the only things by
any means. One of the things that’s a big stock and trade in Industrial
Engineering here in MS&E (in the School of Engineering) now is the
workplace and the interaction with technology and those kinds of questions
and ultimately management thereof. You have a kind of a spectrum of things.
Scott: Hold up. One of the things--we were talking about the differences and that’s
what you’ve been explaining to me, how they have different focuses and
interests in these various departments. But I’d like to get one thing. You
explained that graduate student funding with OR was different from what it
was with EES. I’d like to have that preserved before we start talking about
mergers and things.
Cottle: [01:33:03] The policy of Operations Research was to support all of its
doctoral students in one way or another. Now that would mean some
quarters a student might be a teaching assistant or course assistant. Another
quarter that same student could be a research assistant or be on a fellowship.
That was a big rule.
Scott: And the money for that...?
Cottle: [01:33:42] The money for that came either from the university in the case of
course assistants and so on or research assistantships would come typically
44 from contracts and grants. Then fellowships--well those come to the
university from whatever source and those are a kind of support. Now in
EES, there were many students --I think doctoral students--either finding
their own support or getting support through various little companies, some
of which may have been initiated or created by faculty. Those students would
be working part-time in those companies, let’s say.
[01:34:55] I think one could prove that this process prolonged the
duration of their graduate study, whereas we tried to get them out in four
years or less. In EES they would maybe take six, eight, ten. Now we had
some students who also took long times. They were a bit outliers; the general
policy was to get them out quickly.
Scott: Again, just before we talk about merger and such, what is the relationship
between these two departments?
Cottle: [01:35:59] Between those two departments I guess you’d say it wasn’t the
happiest. This is something that may have some personality side to it that I
don’t really understand; I wasn’t part of it. I tried to be friendly with
everybody. There was a competitive nature there for sure. The Operations
Research Department was closer to Industrial Engineering partly I suppose
because Lieberman and, for that matter Hillier, had come from that
department.
Scott: Closer to Industrial Engineering than to...?
Cottle: [01:36:59] EES. There were also more similarities between, oddly enough,
between OR and Industrial Engineering than between OR and EES on the
support-of-students side of things. There were also differences which I don’t
45 think I could characterize for you. You’ll have to believe me when I say that
there were differences in advancement to candidacy and qualification rules
within the department that were simply very different. In Operations
Research, I can speak to this with certainty, we had two comprehensive
examinations, written comprehensive examinations, each one of which lasted
probably four hours or so and would cover certain coursework and were
generally pretty tough examinations.
[01:38:24] The exams were written and they were held on separate
days. In fact, they might even have been held in separate quarters, partly for
scheduling and the coursework reasons but that’s the way it was. That was
taken into consideration for advancement to candidacy, along with GPA and
maybe other factors. The comparable process in EES was just plain different
and was also different, once again, in Industrial Engineering. I’m sure that
each department had a story that would seem to rationalize the process and
the rules that they used but they were different. This became one of the
hardest aspects to normalize in the merger.
Scott: I think we both have given this our all for today and we’re going to have to
get together again because we have some more history to take care of.
[laughter] I’d like to ask you one question and then sort of tell you what we’ll
do next. You mentioned competition. Competition for what or competition
over what?
Cottle: [01:40:22] I would say competition for students. One thing that I would say
happened from time to time is that a student who didn’t quite make it in
Operations Research would sometimes drift over to Industrial Engineering. I
46 don’t know--I can’t think of cases where they would go to EES. I could be
mistaken about that.
Scott: I’d like to begin again and starting with that retreat and what you called the
opening salvo and then describe the process of merger, the players and how
they interacted. You’ve opened up several topics. One is money, one is [the]
problem over advancement, an issue of the number of full professors. Could
we start with that and then go forward when we meet again?
Cottle: [01:41:38] Sure. I can’t say that I’m going to be able to remember with clarity
all that you’d be interested in but I’ll give you what I’ve got.
Scott: That’s all I could ask for. We’ll get some of your opinion about these changes
and people who you’ve worked with closely, the impact of senior
administrators on your life and the development of your career. I’ll invite you
to reflect on campus events that might have affected you and your work,
your international activities, some opinions and comments on the facts that
you’ve been giving me and then retirement and your new career.
Cottle: [01:42:42] Sounds like at least three sessions.
Scott: [laughter] Retirement and your new career as an historian. I’d actually like to
know what year you retired. That wasn’t clear.
Cottle: [01:42:54] 2005.
Scott: Perfect.
Cottle: [01:42:58] That was the year that Dantzig died and Alan Manne died.
Scott: Oh my goodness, and you retired. What a hit to the department.
Cottle: [01:43:08] I don’t know that anybody’s shed any tears over that. Let me just
tell you, Kandis, that in my retirement, I have maintained a condition of
47 innocence and ignorance in the sense that I don’t really know all that much
about what people are doing. There are new people in the department I’ve
never met. I wouldn’t even know them if I saw them. One of the things that
I think is an interesting issue that you haven’t asked and in a way I hope you
don’t [laughter]...
Scott: Well that puts it on my list. [laughter]
Cottle: [01:44:08] If you look at the blurb on the web about the department, you’ll
see quite a laundry list of specialties. To my way of thinking, that laundry list
is sort of indicative of the kind of spectrum that I was talking about between
the real world and the idealized mathematical world. The thing that I don’t
know but maybe I’ll find out--I’m going to try to ask this month--is to what
extent do the people in the different groups actually talk to each other or
share problems or is there any cross-fertilization or are we just a whole
bunch of separate little test tubes lined up? Know what I mean?
[01:45:22] We have an outstanding chairman who unfortunately is
going to be leaving the position and I am going to ask him this question. I
hope he’s not going to take it as a reproach so I’m going to try to phrase the
question very carefully but I think that there ought to be more interaction
between faculty in things other than department meetings and cocktail
parties or receptions. That would really, I think, deliver on the promise that a
department like this actually has. I will say that if there’s cross-fertilization, it
probably comes from the students rather than the faculty.
[01:46:29] If you have departmental requirements or degree
requirements that force students to take courses in a number of different
48 areas and they get to meet faculty and converse with them or whatever, there’s a chance, by no means guaranteed, but there’s a chance that some interlocking is going to occur.
[End of Interview with Richard W. Cottle, August 5, 2015]
49 50 S T A N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
PROJECT: STANFORD FACULTY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
INTERVIEWER: KANDIS SCOTT
INTERVIEWEE: RICHARD W. COTTLE
DATE OF INTERVIEW: AUGUST 14, 2015
Cottle: [00:00:00] August 14, 2015.
Scott: And Kandis Scott, the interviewer, is meeting Richard Cottle in his office in
the Management Sciences & Engineering Department in Huang Hall. This is
our second opportunity to talk together. Dick, let me tell you where I think
we left off and you tell me if we’re on the same track. You had come to
Stanford and you told me about the people that you worked with in the
Operations Research Department, which had just been created as a
department and not just a program. After that, we skipped ahead a little bit,
until you told me about attending a conference in the School, some sort,
where you talked about Operations Research and took a question from I
think the chair of Electrical Engineering that surprised you.
Cottle: [00:01:11] Oh that. Yes, yes, yes. Oh that was many years after I came here.
Scott: Are there important things that happened between the time you came here
and the time when we’re really looking at one of the first spinoffs3…
3 Actually, mergers, not spinoffs.
51 Cottle: [00:01:27] When you say “important things” are you speaking of important
things for the department or important things for me personally because
they’re two different issues.
Scott: Let’s focus on the department first.
Cottle: [00:01:45] Sure. I think the department did very, very well. It was riding very
high for a long time. We had an excellent faculty, a small, but excellent
faculty. We were all very harmonious and I think that I even mentioned to
you that we suffered from an excess of harmony. [laughter] Anyway, at a
certain point, and now I’m trying to remember what year this was. I don’t
have these dates fully in mind but probably around 1980 or maybe a little
earlier, there was a change in the chairmanship [of] the department. 4
[00:02:45] Then there was, some years later, I think maybe ten years
later, another change.5 At any rate, in the year 1990, I became chair of the
department and was chair until 1996.
Scott: Let me interrupt you for a moment. Because we’ve just gone from 1967 to
1990 and you said that the department was excellent, was working well.
There were changes in the department chairs. Was any of that interesting,
controversial, dramatic?
Cottle: [00:03:35] I don’t think so. I mean, Jerry Lieberman [Gerald J. Lieberman]
was the founding chair and he had a very high standing in university circles
and eventually became, I think maybe an acting provost or a title something
like that.6 He was in that position when Gerhard Casper came on as
4 This occurred in 1975. 5 The next change in chairmanship occurred in 1985. 6 He was provost, not acting provost, under presidents Kennedy and Casper.
52 president of the university and he was very helpful to Gerhard in helping to
get him acclimated and so on because, as you know, I’m sure, he came from
the University of Chicago. At any rate, I don’t know exactly why Jerry
Lieberman ceased to be the chair except maybe he was tired of it and wanted
to have a higher station in the university.7
[00:04:50] I wasn’t really privy to those thoughts. In any event, the
next chair was Pete Veinott [Arthur F. Veinott, Jr.] who held that position
for, I don’t know, something like ten years I’d say. Then he was followed by
Don Iglehart [Donald Iglehart]. Now there was also a certain amount of
turnover in the deanship in the School of Engineering during those years.
For example, Joe Pettit [Joseph Mayo Pettit] was the dean at the time that the
department was formed. He left Stanford and went to Georgia Tech and
another dean who I believe, if I remember correctly, was Bill Kays [William
M. Kays].
[00:06:00] After him, I believe--well we could check this--there are
photographs on the second floor that would clear up that history. I think that
Jim Gibbons [James F. Gibbons] became dean. He was the dean at the time
that I became chair and he was dean before I became chair in 1990. He was
then followed by Jim Plummer [James D. Plummer]. I think that after--wait a
minute, excuse me--John Hennessy was the chair of the Computer Science
Department, then the dean of the School of Engineering even before
Plummer I believe. It was normal turnover in this position and it was pretty
normal for chairs to rotate. It’s a tough job for some people. Not everybody
7 Lieberman’s chairmanship of operations research ended in 1975.
53 wants to do it and not everybody’s capable of doing it. In any event, there
were changes, but nothing particularly exciting.
Scott: Normal.
Cottle: [00:07:19] I wouldn’t call it controversial. There were things going on
elsewhere that might have been but not in our department.
Scott: That brings you into the role of chair. Why not tell me something about that.
Cottle: [00:07:37] Yes, well it’s not something that I especially relished I guess I’d
have to say. I’m a kind of do-it-yourself sort of person, and not particularly a
natural supervisor or boss of other people. Probably more than any other
faculty member in the department, I had a frequent turnover in what were
then called secretaries and are now called administrative assistants. One of
the funniest things along those lines is that one year I got this mug from my
then secretary which said, “World’s Greatest Boss,” and two weeks later, she
quit. [laughter]
[00:08:48] Now she probably found a better paying job or better
circumstances, whatever. Anyway, it’s one of those things. The thing that I
really disliked the most, I have to say, about being chair, was the process of
salary setting. I don’t know how it is in other places, other schools, but the
way it worked was that the department would get a certain increase in its
overall budget. Then one had to set salaries for individual faculty or at least
recommend the salaries or, maybe the equivalent, recommend a percentage
increase or something like that and then make the case with the dean.
[00:09:58] There was also another little policy that was floating
around, and that it was important to increase the salaries of junior people,
54 bigger percentages than senior people. That left very little to work with.
Making judgments about people’s research and teaching and all the hand-
wringing that went on in connection with that over a relatively small amount
of money was very, very disturbing and frustrating. The way it seemed to me,
a person could just go through all kinds of effort to improve teaching or
have greater output and still come out with only a few hundred dollars a year
more than otherwise.
[00:11:24] That seemed ridiculous to me. That part I didn’t care for. I
did enjoy the hooding of PhD students and the ceremonial part at
commencement and all that. That was nice.
Scott: While you were in that position, there was this event with all the departments
within engineering, is that right? Why don’t we go back to that? You did
mention it before. I think that’ll start you on the story of these mergers and
all.
Cottle: [00:12:05] Yes, now this was not the first time the “M” [merger] word had
been voiced you understand. The story is this--there was a summer kind of
retreat or something of that nature up on the hill there, either at NBER or at
the Center for Advanced Study, something like that. Each chair was
supposed to give a kind of a survey of his own department--I use the word
“his” advisedly here--and this involved, for example, research volume, a big
thing in engineering. This means the total amount of money that comes in on
contracts and grants.
[00:13:13] This, for most people [in the department], was
troublesome and became more so while I was chair. At any rate, one of the
55 things that I remember stressing in my survey of the department was the
demographics. I think I said something like the average age in the
department is 57, which was a pretty big number for most departments.
Anyhow, after my presentation was finished came a question period. You
understand this is attended by the deans, their associate deans and
department chairs.
[00:14:14] The chair of Electrical Engineering asked the question,
“Why shouldn’t Operations Research,” my department, “and Engineering-
Economic Systems and Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management
be merged into one department?” He said, “It seems to me they all do the
same thing. “
Scott: That was the dean who asked that question?
Cottle: [00:14:50] No, it was the chair of the electrical engineering department. I
can’t really tell you whether that question was planted or it was spontaneous.
But there it was. I was quite unprepared for the question or any question for
that matter. I had never attended one of these things before. I was a little
concerned. I sort of had to think on my feet on that occasion as I often do.
[laughter]
What I said was that we are different departments. We have different
practices. We approach what appears to be the same subject in different
ways.
[00:16:02] By and large, the Operations Research Department is a
much more theoretical department and thinks of itself as one part of what is
called mathematical sciences, whereas the other two departments don’t make
56 such a statement and don’t have that kind of outlook. They’re much more
focused on real world problems. Now it’s not that Operations Research
ignores real world problems, but rather attempts to generalize real world
problems in such a way that many seemingly different applications are all
amenable to treatment by particular methods that we develop or study. I said
that and other things about how we handle PhD students differently and so
forth.
[00:17:17] I don’t know that I got much pushback on that statement,
but that didn’t seem to stop the juggernaut that was coming our way. It took
several years to happen. The meeting that I was referring to just now was
probably in the summer of 1990 but possibly also 1991. I don’t remember.
At any rate, it was around that time that Jerry Lieberman was diagnosed with
Lou Gehrig’s disease and that was quite an issue for us--concern for us
naturally. At any rate, we were not in favor of a merger. I don’t think the
other departments were in favor of a merger either. I think it’s safe to say
that each, in its own way, argued against it.
[00:18:57] Of course, the force behind this was primarily the dean. I
think I expressed last time the thought that I had then that he wanted to find
ways to take billets from a merged department and put them in other
departments. By combining forces [i.e., departments], it might be possible to
do that.
Scott: Do you think there were any other reasons that he would be especially
interested in merger?
57 Cottle: [00:19:51] I’m sure that he was cognizant of the financial welfare or lack of it,
of the departments, my department particularly. I think I related to you the
fact that we had been living on gift funds to support doctoral students. At
the rate that fund was declining, the department certainly stood to be in
bankruptcy or something like it before too long. He might have been
thinking about [the merger] as a solution to that problem. I guess you could
say that condition of ours sort of fit into his plan I think.
Scott: Were the other departments also strapped, perhaps not as much as yours?
Was this a time of general cutbacks?
Cottle: [00:21:08] I don’t know about other departments’ financial welfare. It seems
to me there was a time when some of the smaller departments almost went
out of existence because of either declining enrollments or shrinking faculty
size or something. I believe they’re doing well now, which is good.
Scott: You’ve presented me with a situation where the various components of what
will become a merged department are not enthusiastic. How did that decision
come to pass? You said it didn’t happen immediately. Can you tell me a little
bit about the process of that?
Cottle: [00:22:13] Maybe you could say that the chair of EES, who was Jim Sweeney
[James L. Sweeney], and I were, shall we say, more malleable than other
faculty. We just saw the inevitable and worked together to make it happen.
There were many things that needed to be worked out there. I think I’d have
to say, first of all, that as far as curriculum is concerned, there’s probably
more resemblance between Operations Research and EES than there was
between Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. There might be
58 some who would dispute that but one thing I know and that is that EES had
their own courses in optimization [and stochastic models] as we did.
[00:23:36] They had courses in stochastic models as we did. They
probably had courses in game theory. There was a lot of apparent overlap
between the course offerings, at least on the basis of names. It became
possible to somehow or other blend these things. We came out of it, I would
say, pretty well. There are, I imagine, those who would dispute that, people
who were more dedicated to the kind of approach that we practiced and so
on, and the standards that we think we set.
Scott: One problem when you’re merging or you’re blending courses is that one
teacher doesn’t get to teach it anymore.
Cottle: [00:24:59] You’re quite right.
Scott: Or the other one has to teach a larger class. Was that a source of
unhappiness among the faculty?
Cottle: [00:25:07] That’s an interesting point. Certainly there is--there must have
been some unhappiness about that, though I can’t remember any expression
of it. That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. I just don’t remember it. Yes, you’re
quite right. On the other hand, it could be that this provided opportunities
for branching out into elective courses that wouldn’t have been otherwise
available.
Scott: You said that you were pretty flexible as was Jim Sweeney. What about the
other people in OR? Were they equally flexible?
Cottle: [00:26:03] No, well I mean, there was just lots of objection. It was kind of an
irresistible or a strong force. We just didn’t have a voice in this. We tried with
59 the provost, for example, on a couple of occasions. That didn’t go well. I
think we did a good job presenting our case, but it was not bought. There
may have been a deal in the works between the provost and the dean. I
wasn’t privy to any of that nor was anyone else that I know. I can’t really say
anything more about it but it’s possible. It’s possible.
Scott: You’d said that when--starting at that conference that--the departments that
were brought up were EES and...
Cottle: [00:27:22] I wouldn’t call it a conference. I would just call it a retreat. It’s like
about, I don’t know, fifteen people or so. It’s not a conference.
Scott: A retreat, thank you. The ones who we’re talking about merging were
Operations Research, Engineering-Economic Systems, Industrial
Engineering and Engineering Management.
Cottle: [00:27:47] Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management--I don’t
know how far back that title goes, but they certainly had it eventually.8 You
see, four years after the merger that I spoke of where there was another
merger.
Scott: Don’t get me there yet. This merger--the one we’ve been speaking of--was
that just the two departments, OR and EES?
Cottle: [00:28:17] Yes, and I would add that it was the wish of the Operations
Research Department prior to that first merger, that if there’s going to be a
merger, do all three and not just the two. I suppose part of the reason is that
it would be like the other shoe dropping, but there was also a greater
8 This name was adopted in 1978.
60 similarity in the handling of PhD students between OR and Industrial
Engineering than there was between OR and EES.
Scott: That merger then came to pass did you say about 19...
Cottle: [00:29:11] 1996.
Scott: What was the department called then?
Cottle: [00:29:19] A very catchy title: Engineering-Economic Systems and
Operations Research.
Scott: [laughing] How imaginative. That’s when you stopped being chair, right? So
you worked that deal?
Cottle: [00:29:37] I became associate chair. Jim Sweeney became chair.
Scott: Then what happened? How did things go along here? Any big changes? Did
your financial status improve?
Cottle: [00:29:56] Yes, well the financial [status] improved, in effect, there was a
certain bailing out that occurred. I guess, in a way, this bailing out--I’m about
to explain this. There’s an interesting little tale pertaining to student support
and some trouble that the OR Department got into while I was chair. This is
an amazing story. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but certain kinds of
student support provides only nine units of tuition credit. We wanted first-
year PhD students in the Operations Research Department to be taking four
courses. There was a kind of a gap there.
Scott: Four courses would be twelve units.
Cottle: [00:31:19] Twelve units precisely, if not more but twelve for sure. And so
how do we get the twelve for those who were on nine unit support? We had
them taking the courses but not enrolling, doing the work and not enrolling.
61 In the next year where the course expectation was lighter, they would enroll
in the course and get the grade that they had earned the previous year. This
was the invention of Pete Veinott and that was done--it was quietly done for
years until one year when I was chair and one of our staff people in a staff
meeting revealed to the entire room where she was sitting and attending that
the Operations Research Department does this. Pete Veinott called it the
Early Bird Program.
[00:33:00] We got in a considerable amount of trouble that way.
Scott: Who gave you that trouble?
Cottle: [00:33:10] It came from the provost and legal office. I had to appear as chair
to face the provost and the law office and all of that. I had nothing to do
with the design of this program or anything. I was just in the chairmanship at
the time that it was revealed. I guess the university’s position is that they were
owed some money. When I referred to bailing out, I was thinking, at least in
part, of this debt that the department owed the university, which we could ill
afford to pay out of our reserves. That was a very, very trying period for me
when I was chair.
Scott: How much money? Do you remember, have any idea? Was it thousands or
tens of thousands or hundreds?
Cottle: [00:34:34] I would say it was probably tens of thousands. I don’t remember
the exact figure, nor do I want to remember that. [laughter] It was significant
money. Somehow or other EES helped in that I believe.
Scott: Now we have this merged department. What happens next?
62 Cottle: [00:35:17] Of course, there were still a lot of people getting used to it and it
sort of went along. Within four years, even less, the whole notion of merging
with Industrial Engineering came up. In some respects, that seemed to us
Operations Research people what should have been done in the first place, as
I said. There was just that much more regularization of everything to work
out.
Scott: Could you tell me the year that that happened?
Cottle: [00:36:25] The merger itself took place in the year 2000, January 2000 is
when we opened the new department. One of the contentious things in joint
faculty meetings was what to call this thing. I think it came out pretty well.
Management Science and Engineering I think is not so bad for this reason:
There are many people who equate the terms “Management Science” and
“Operations Research”. From that standpoint, it seemed quite good. The
professional society that most of us would normally belong to--the one that
we would have most in common let’s say--is called Institution for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences.
[00:37:47] The Management Science name seemed pretty good. And
then the “and engineering” part of it made it clear that that’s where we’re
sitting and not in the School of Business.
I believed I mentioned to you that there are people in the School of
Business here at Stanford who do work that is very much like what might be
done here, possibly with a more applied twist to it but still some really
excellent theoreticians. Those people belong to a group over there called, I
believe, Operations, Information and Technology, something of that sort.
63 [00:38:47] I think also, as I mentioned last time, that there has been a
certain amount of competition between the School of Engineering and the
Business School. I know for a fact that one of the things about Business
School courses is that some of them have limited enrollments so that
students from over here can’t just go over there and take those courses. Not
all the courses are limited. It’s probably mostly the MBA type courses. The
ones that some of our students, particularly master’s students, might like to
take, would be closed to them perhaps.
Scott: Were any of your courses closed to business students?
Cottle: [00:39:46] No, we didn’t have any closed courses that I know of. There may
have been things that had to be very small but no, I don’t think we had
closed courses. There may have been other issues, things that I don’t know
about. Here’s a little aspect of it. I mentioned salary setting. Many students
from Operations Research, for example, many of our PhD graduates--those
who are in the academic world-- have positions in business schools. There
are a couple of reasons for this. Not every institution has an Operations
Research Department. That’s the first thing.
[00:40:44] The second thing is that business schools do teach some of
these methods. And this is where the issue comes up, they pay a lot more.
They’re a professional school. We’re just engineering. One of the things that
used to be done by my predecessors as chair would be to gather information
about what professors in other institutions, particularly in business, are
earning and use that as an argument for increasing salaries here in
64 engineering. Anyway, so we staked the flag in the School of Engineering with
the name and all the rest. It’s worked out OK.
Scott: That’s good. I’d like to search back in your memory. You suggest an OR
faculty that can accept the reality that these mergers are going to happen and
have made no mention of any kind of unpleasantness or unfriendliness
among the faculty who used to be in different departments. Was it all that
smooth? Obviously you must have had a lot of administrative things that had
to be regulated. The personalities of the faculty would seem to me to be
touched by this kind of event.
Cottle: [00:42:53] Sure. There have been those kinds of disputes and differences of
opinion. I don’t have any particularly interesting stories to tell. I think back
of one joint meeting, maybe more than one, where Pete Veinott was arguing
for Operations Research. I don’t remember if it was in connection with the
name of the department or just the independence of the department or
something like that. He went and dug up statistics from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics in great detail.9 He was a man of just incredible dedication to getting
the details of something. Kandis, I’ll tell you before he passed away and some
of the furniture got taken away, this room looked a little bit different.
[00:44:44] He went through nineteen different floor layout designs
done on a computer with, I don’t know, AutoCAD or whatever they call
that, down to a quarter of an inch, determining whether this cabinet would fit
there or not, that kind of stuff. I would love to be able to show you a copy of
it; it was just incredible. Anyway, he sort of gave that kind of a treatment to
9 The aim of this statistical research was to demonstrate the importance of the name operations research as an occupation.
65 this Bureau of Labor Statistics thing. It was just overkill. It was a perfect
example of “more is less.” That’s not the way he saw it. There were people
from other departments like EES who would argue against that kind of
position--[that choice of name]--or whatever. I don’t know.
[00:46:01] I’ll tell you what I think happened eventually was that we
built here what you might call seven or eight departments within one and we
have a lot of different tracks. We somehow or other reached agreement that
folks in this track shall get qualified this way and people in this track will get
qualified that way. We weren’t forcing any particular system on anybody
unless such force came from the university where there are rules you have to
abide by. Within the department, we just sort of had our own different way
of doing stuff. In this department as I imagine you’ve become aware, you’ve
got people doing optimization, stochastic systems, modeling, energy
economics, and other kinds of economics.
[00:47:36] There are people who study what is called decision and
risk. We have people focusing on the workplace and particularly work in
technology, the technology workplace, and people who study organizations
and entrepreneurship and it goes on and on--oh and policy and strategy. Bill
Perry, for example, the former Secretary of Defense, is a member of this
department and was, by the way, I think quite an effective arbitrator in the
merging process. He’s a very level-headed, diplomatic sort of man.
Scott: Before taking a break, I think you hinted at your own personal attitudes.
What did you think about these mergers and we talked about two really?
66 Your feelings about them. I understand you’re a good trooper and you made
them work.
Cottle: [00:49:18] Look, do you want to take the break now or...
Scott: Is your answer going to be long?
Cottle: [00:49:25] I don’t know. I’m making it up as I go along.
Scott: Let’s take your answer now. You’ll forget it after the break. [laughter] Your
feelings about the...
Cottle: [00:49:35] First of all, the merger came into being--am I right about this--and
shortly after the merger came the whole business of moving into this
building.
Scott: Oh the second merger?
Cottle: [00:50:13] The second merger. As far as the first merger or any merger that
changes the name of the department, I think it probably makes it a bit harder
to recruit students to the original department. At least that was our
perception of it. Probably a little harder to hold your head up in a national
meeting or something like that because it was widely known that there was
this transition and that, I imagine, harmed us in recruiting faculty as well.
Certainly things were OK.
Then we moved over here in the year 2010 I guess it was. The
department, at that time, was celebrating its tenth anniversary.
[00:52:14] At first when the building was going up and everything, I
really disliked the building itself. I was just concerned about the, I don’t
know, you might say the starkness of it all. I’ve gotten used to it and am even
perfectly happy with it.
67 Scott: When you say starkness, do you mean the design or is there feeling in here
that’s less convivial?
Cottle: [00:52:57] Look, there was a certain amount of rigidity with regard to
furniture that was imposed to a large extent. There was a whole question
about whether there would be carpeting on the floor or no carpeting on the
floor and would people’s heels go clippity-clop on the floor. Frankly, I was
worried about these atria here: are they an invitation to suicide? We haven’t
had any to the best of my knowledge, and I hope we never do. Those were
the thoughts. Now with the department here in this building, we have some
very nice facilities.
[00:54:12] We have a very nice kind of terrace area, which I would be
happy to show you. We have a nice kitchen. We have a lounge area which, to
the best of my knowledge, is not used and I’m not talking about the one out
here. I’m talking about the one at the end of this corridor. It’s much cooler
than the other place, Terman Engineering Center, used to be. I feel somehow
or other that people are distributed. When I come in, I rarely see anybody,
faculty that is.
Scott: Even during the school year?
Cottle: [00:55:04] Yes. I don’t know about that.
Scott: Do you think faculty members are not here or do they have their doors
closed?
Cottle: [00:55:14] A little of both. I imagine that faculty get together, some of them,
in groups from time to time. I’m just not all that aware of it. I’m embarrassed
to say this but I don’t normally go to department colloquia or seminars since
68 I retired. Part of the reason is that I have a little bit of what I think of as
narcolepsy and I’m afraid of falling asleep [laughter] in one of those things. I
don’t usually attend them. I have attended some when there’s a special talk
that I want to hear or something, you know, I make an effort.
[00:56:24] Otherwise, no, faculty don’t [seem to] get together. [on
projects across research areas]. That, I think, is regrettable because I think
there ought to be something intellectual, not just social but intellectual, that
brings the department together where people can learn other ways of thought
and maybe make connections about problems and solutions and ideas and so
forth. I don’t see much evidence of that.
Scott: Even these colloquia, they don’t satisfy that?
Cottle: [00:57:01] They might but I’m not aware of it. First of all as I said, I don’t
attend but I’m not even sure that there are many of these things announced.
When we’re in the process of hiring and we have bright, young men or
women coming through and talking, there tends to be a little bit of that going
on. They’re there with a purpose and that is to check out these people and
see which ones they think are good and so forth.
[break]
Scott: You’ve mentioned a little bit when describing the changes of the possible
roles of senior administrators. Do you want to add anything to the role of the
provost or the deans, the presidents of the university on the history of
Operations Research? Is there anything to add?
Cottle: [00:58:38] I don’t think I can recall anything very special along those lines. I
must say that with respect to presidents and even provosts, I have managed
69 to get a certain amount of positive feedback in my life as a historian, let’s say.
I’m speaking now, of course, of the Stanford Street Names book. That’s not the
only historical writing I’ve done but the other stuff hasn’t come to the
attention of the administration somehow.
[00:59:35] I think the most amusing thing along those lines and, of
course, was probably tongue and cheek when said, but Gerhard Casper sent
me a note saying that my book was the most interesting one that had crossed
his desk in five years. [laughter]
Scott: That’s quite good.
Cottle: [01:00:05] I’ve gotten nice comments from John Hennessy and from Don
Kennedy. I feel good about that. And I feel good about having, shall we say,
given something to Stanford which was, I think, rather sorely needed.
Scott: We’re going to talk more about that in a little bit. You’ve talked to me about
the original ten in the OR Department when you joined and the fondness
that you had for one another and the respect for one another. Are there
other people that you worked closely with who’ve affected your career that
we haven’t talked about and that you might want to share something about?
Cottle: [01:01:02] Sure. As far as Stanford faculty are concerned, there are two
people that sort of stand out, maybe three, one of whom was in the
department. Of course, this is over and above my mentor, colleague, friend,
George Dantzig. Alan Manne and I were good friends and our wives were
good friends and we used to see them socially. Alan and I used to have lunch
together once a month. This was I think after he retired. Alan was an
equestrian. At first, how this happened I can’t begin to say but around age
70 60, which would have [been] 1985, he took up polo and did a lot of that; he had his own string of ponies, as they say, and played that with great pleasure.
[01:02:29] After a while, after a couple of injuries, he gave that up and did simple things like jumping. Anyway, he and I used to have lunch out in
Ladera once a month near where his horses lived. That was very nice. One time Alan proposed that the two of us read the Iliad together in Greek, which neither one of us knew. [laughter] We got ourselves a copy of an edition of the Iliad with Greek on one side and English on the other and we tried to make our way through that. I think we got [through] about one and a half sentences in the first session and decided that this was a non-starter.
[01:03:35] The book went back on the shelf and we got a different edition of the Iliad which we read in English out loud. We spent a, I don’t know, must have been close to a year meeting once a week, reading out loud, kind of alternating and enjoying that. There was a lot of business in that book about horses, which was very special. He was one person that had that kind of effect on me. We even had some technical interaction. Even though
Alan was not a mathematician; he was an economist by training. He was one of the leaders in desktop computing and using certain software that was suitable for kinds of problems that we people deal with. I admired him a lot for that.
[01:04:57] Another person is Jerry Lieberman, of course, who was a friend. He wasn’t so terribly influential on me in my research because his interests were in a different part of operations research anyway. Another person I’m thinking of is Ingram Olkin from the Statistics Department, who
71 also has a joint appointment in the School of Education. He and I have
written papers together and done a lot of things together over the years.
There’s another person from...
Scott: You’re writing about theoretical math and statistics or education?
Cottle: [01:05:56] It was statistical but it was statistics with an optimization twist. We
also shared an interest in a subject called linear algebra. There’s a third
person who had a big interest in that who’s unfortunately no longer with us.
His name was Gene H. Golub. He was in the Computer Science Department
and a very much respected person, mostly outside his own department, I
should say, all around the world. It’s just amazing. Gene and Ingram and I, at
one point, actually fantasized about writing a book together on linear algebra
and matrix theory. [01:07:04] We made some initial steps along those lines
but we were all much too busy with other things and so it never actually
came to pass. But it was a nice thought.
Scott: That’s such a nice example of what you told me about before that many
disciplines would fall under the title of Operations Research. That’s sort of a
living example of that principle.
Cottle: [01:07:34] In a way it is. Operations research is something that was sort of
put together with a lot of different elements. I’m speaking now about the
discipline of operations research. It came into being during the Second
World War and was participated in, if you like, by people from many
different disciplines--physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, sociologists,
physiologists, engineers of various kinds, particularly electrical engineers and
72 people who developed radar. All of these elements are kind of mingled
together.
[01:08:30] I would have to say that part of the reason that operations
research is so broad is just because that’s what was needed at the time. Then
it kind of morphed into a number of other things and some of these other
things, I would say, kind of pulled back what they wanted from operations
research. In point of fact, you can find academic departments in this country
where you have statistics and operations research, civil engineering and
operations research, certainly management science in the school of business.
There’s something called management operations or operations management.
It just goes on and on.
Scott: Interesting department.
Cottle: [01:09:46] Those three though, I would say, Golub--I wrote papers with
Golub too and we shared students and so forth. It was wonderful. He died in
a very untimely way.
Scott: I’m sorry to hear that. I’m going to switch tracks here and I’m actually going
to return to something that you spoke about before and I’m not clear that I
explored it with you thoroughly enough. Forgive me. You don’t have to
repeat what you said but see if you want to add. I just wanted you to look
back on things that were happening on the campus generally, not so much
your department, things like curricula revisions, campus unrest, indirect
costs, budget cutting. Do you have any comments about them? Did any of
that affect you? As I said, you’ve answered that in part and I just want to
make sure that you completed your thoughts.
73 Cottle: [01:11:04] I don’t really think that there was anything particularly
transformative for me about those things that you just mentioned. I can
remember some rioting on campus, some window breaking over at the
Hoover Institution. There was a time--you see, when the Operations
Research Department was housed in Encina Commons, just across the way
from the Hoover Institution. Because of the fact that operations research,
even during the Vietnam era, was being used in military setting, there was
concern that there would be some vandalism taking place at the department.
[01:12:06] Faculty went over there to man the barricades or whatever
it is. I remember a little of that. I can even remember hearing from our
house, which is just near Stanford Avenue, sirens and whatnot on campus
and those kinds of things. As for the budget issues, I don’t remember much
of that. I don’t think it affected me particularly, maybe in the salary sense it
did. But I was pretty fatalistic about that to be honest. I just felt happy to be
getting what I was getting and never made a fuss about it.
[01:13:06] I remember that I served in the faculty senate a couple of
times and I should tell you the way that that was accomplished. In a certain
sense, it sort of contradicts part of what I said earlier but the Department of
Operations Research and the Engineering-Economic Systems Department
and the Chemical Engineering Department had a coalition vis-à-vis the
faculty senate. We would vote as a group for a chosen member of one of the
three departments, and it would rotate. It was very effective.
Scott: Was it kept secret or did people know that was going on?
74 Cottle: [01:14:02] We didn’t much care. It was legal. That way these three small
departments managed to have a presence in the faculty senate occasionally.
One of the things that I remember was the whole business about the
university and the ONR [Office of Naval Research] and that...
Scott: Indirect costs?
Cottle: [01:14:35] Yes. That business. I remember hearing Don Kennedy say that
when all this is over, we’ll find that the government owes Stanford money
rather than the other way around. [laughter] I thought that was pretty
impressive.
Scott: But wrong.
Cottle: [01:14:56] [laughter] Yes. Maybe it was his take on it.
Scott: That’s right. I’m sure it was. I want to turn a little bit back to your career. I
know from reading your résumé that you’ve been active in international
professional organizations. Maybe in your field, those organizations are
international?
Cottle: [01:15:25] Pretty much. I think so. They may have a national title of some
kind like, for example, in the very old days, there was something called the
Operations Research Society of America but you didn’t have to be American
to be a member as far as I can recall. I was a member of a German OR and
economics kind of organization. Typically the meetings of these
organizations and their membership are international.
Scott: I saw that you won the Senior US Scientist Award from the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation. When was that?
75 Cottle: [01:16:29] The award was actually made in 1977 but it wasn’t exactly
exercised, if you will, until the next year. I deferred it for a year.
Scott: Did you teach in Germany?
Cottle: [01:16:49] No, I was there doing research. I gave a lecture or two or three or
I don’t know how many. I went around to various different German
universities but I was stationed at the University of Bonn. It’s a very
complicated matter, the year that I had there. For one thing, we had two
teenage kids at the time. I think they were teenaged. Yes. They were
teenaged. One of them had been admitted to Stanford and the other one was
going into high school. We decided that we would go over as a family.
[01:18:00] We looked the situation over there and decided that the
best thing for the kids, or maybe I should put it this way--that which would
make the kids least unhappy--would be to enroll [them] in the American
School in Bonn, which is where the capital of the country was at that time.
This is 1978. There was an American Embassy there and there were
American diplomats and whatnot and families and so on, but it was an
international school just teaching in English. There were kids from other
diplomatic families, for example, and so forth. The people who put together
the nomination for the award for me were from three places. One was from
Cologne. [01:19:05] One was from, at the time, Bayreuth, I think, in
Germany. The third one was from Graz in Austria. No, I take that back. Two
of them were from Cologne but one of those from Cologne eventually went
to Graz. Anyhow, and the one from Bayreuth went to someplace else. It was
a lot of moving around. In any case, none of these cities was Bonn where we
76 wanted to live. I managed to get the award--the award paid handsomely I
should say. It wasn’t just a little diploma on the wall. It was enough money to
take care of our kids’ tuition at Stanford at the time. It wasn’t trivial. This was
something that was sort of Germany’s payback for the Marshall Plan.
[01:20:16] Of course, not all of it went to me. I had to share it with
some others.10 That was the idea. I was very concerned about the legality of
all of this vis-à-vis my Stanford position because I was taking a sabbatical or
a leave of absence for a year and getting paid by Stanford, but I was also
getting a handsome stipend from this award. Anyway, that all worked out.
The kids were utterly miserable for most of the time. In fact, our daughter
came back to the States and lived here at Stanford with friends and our son
stuck it out. [01:21:16] Eventually, by the time we were ready to leave, he
wanted to stay for another year. That’s the way it is with kids. [laughter] That
was an important thing in my life. I made a lot of contacts there in Germany
some of which I had earlier and others I kept over the years.
Scott: Do you think that influenced your work here at Stanford when you came
back?
Cottle: [01:21:51] Yes. I would say so. I did some fairly decent research over there at
that time. About four years earlier, I had spent a quarter at the ETH in
Zurich. There I sort of gave a course that evolved into a book that was
eventually published in 1992. That’s eighteen years if I’ve done the math
correctly. Along the way, I signed up two of my very good PhD students to
10 I have no idea what I meant by this unless it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek humor.
77 collaborate with me on this book.11 By that time, they were already pretty
well established themselves. They did so and that book became very
successful, not in a financial sense but in its reputation as the book to go to--
referred to as the Bible of the subject. [laughter] That was very good.
[01:23:21] While I was there in Bonn, I worked a bit on that book and on
research that went into the book and so forth.
Scott: These times abroad, it seems, had a very positive effect on your status here,
on your reputation, at least internationally. Did they have any adverse effects?
Did you come back and find out your colleagues were all jealous of you
and...?
Cottle: [01:23:53] No. Nobody was jealous, no, not that I know of.
Scott: Did you feel that your allegiances were now being divided between
commitment to international scholarship and Stanford?
Cottle: [01:24:08] Everybody had international scholarship and everybody went
places. That was just normal, perfectly normal. It was just a matter of course
I’d say.
Scott: Let’s go to your retirement which I understand was what 2005? Is that right?
Cottle: [01:24:38] Right.
Scott: What made you retire then? How did you decide?
Cottle: [01:24:47] Back in the old days, people normally retired at 65. In 2005, I was
already past 70 so I thought, you know, I think it’s time. What’s more, I was
feeling as though I didn’t have the energy. I have a lot of arthritis and
couldn’t hold a piece of chalk too well or an eraser. [laughter] So I thought,
11 The book referred to here is The Linear Complementarity Problem.
78 “Why am I doing this? What I can do is just continue my research and
writing and things of that sort,” and it was fine.
Scott: I think you mentioned to me that both Dantzig and Manne had died by that
time.
Cottle: [01:26:03] Same year. In that year, yes.
Scott: In that year.
Cottle: [01:26:06] Right. But I retired before they died.
Scott: So their deaths weren’t a cause for your retirement or anything.
Cottle: [01:26:11] Manne, by the way, [laughter] was on horseback at the time that he
had, I don’t know, [a] heart attack or something--heart attack and fell off the
horse, and I think broke his neck and he died not too long after that.
Scott: In the saddle, I’d say.
Cottle: [01:26:34] Yes. Everybody says that he died doing what he loved, which was
nice to think of, but I’d just as soon have him around. [laughter]
Scott: Since your retirement, you’ve become something of an historian. Can you tell
how you got into that field? What was that all about?
Cottle: [01:27:00] It was just sheer curiosity. This was in the early nineties. I
remember having lunch with Jerry Lieberman at the Faculty Club and I asked
him, “Is there any kind of a publication that would help a person understand
why Stanford street names are as they are, who these people are, what these
things are?” He said “No, not that I know of, but you should talk to Maggie
Kimball”--who, at that time, was the university archivist. I had a lunch with
Maggie. This was around March of 1992 and she said to me she doesn’t
know of any [such] book, but there’s a person by the name of Karen
79 Bartholomew who, at that time, was working for the News Service at
Stanford and was a member of the Stanford Historical Society and had the
intention of writing a book about Stanford place names, not just streets but
buildings, various parts of the campus and what have you.
[01:28:37] I took that information and didn’t do much with it that I
can remember. One day I was at a kind of a social event. It was the
inauguration of the new Sequoia Hall, the home of the Statistics Department
and who did I see there but Karen. I knew who Karen was because I had
served in the senate as I mentioned to you and I had seen her there in the
role of reporter. Now she was there in the role of the spouse of a statistician.
I don’t think he was actually a member of the department in the tenure line
faculty but he was a statistician and part of that community and he was there.
For all I know, he was a benefactor.
[01:29:47] I went up to her and I told her about my encounter with
Maggie Kimball. She was very enthusiastic and supportive and said that she’s
got some material that she could give me.
Scott: But she wasn’t writing. She wasn’t intending to write.
Cottle: [01:30:11] She has a million irons in the fire and just hadn’t really gotten it
done and still hasn’t. By the way, [she’s done] many other things though. I
began working on that [street names project soon thereafter.]
Scott: When?
Cottle: [01:30:28] In 1992 and, as I say, it was just curiosity about street names that
got me interested, particularly the name “Panama”. What business does
Stanford have having a street called Panama? That got me started. I worked
80 on that for thirteen years--out of my back pocket, of course. Remember I
was chairman at the time.
Scott: That’s right. [laughter] In 1992.
Cottle: [01:31:05] Karen took me around and showed me a few things about how to
use the archives and how to use stuff at the News Service and so on. That
helped quite a bit. That’s how that got started.
Scott: I thought it was a post-retirement effort for you.
Cottle: [01:31:31] The publication did occur post-retirement. The publication was in
2005, the first edition, but it got started in 1992.
Scott: You were fully engaged as a faculty member in those years.
Cottle: [01:31:48] Oh yes, definitely.
Scott: That’s terrific. So the idea was just your curiosity. Tell me a little bit about
your research and how long it took. Was Stanford helpful in publishing it,
encouraging you?
Cottle: [01:32:12] Glad you asked. [laughter] I went around to various people. I
would look at Stanford publications like the little book called Stanford Facts,
maybe you’ve seen it in the bookstore. I went to see the people who
published that. I went to the Stanford Alumni Association and the story that
I got was much the same everywhere. By the way, I was all set to do the
typesetting myself. I had a draft and I thought it was pretty good. But
anyway, I went around and I showed people this kind of sample, so to speak,
and they said, “Oh, this is wonderful but we don’t have a budget for this.”
Then I realized that Stanford street names have, shall we say, representatives
in many schools in the university.
81 [01:33:32] I thought well, that being the case, if I went around to see
some deans, maybe they would have some discretionary funds that they
could contribute. I began with the dean of research, who was a former
neighbor by the name Charles Kruger. He was in engineering. He promised
two thousand dollars.
Scott: Why did you think these departments would be interested?
Cottle: [01:34:14] Schools. Because members of their faculty are memorialized in
these street names.
Scott: Oh, of course, it’s their history too.
Cottle: [01:34:26] Yes. I went to him and then I went to the dean of the School of
Engineering, and I went to the school of what was then Earth Sciences or
something like that and I was doing great. Then I went to the dean of the
School of Education who told me that her job at the moment was to cut
expenses, not to generate expenses. I was turned down over there. By that
time, I had five thousand dollars in hand, so to speak, and I thought well
maybe the way to go is to Building 10, the president’s office. I went to the
president and the provost or maybe I just went to the president and I made a
pitch to him.
Scott: Who was that?
Cottle: [01:35:30] It was Hennessy, who by that time knew me at least because I had
been present in the executive council when he was dean and also when he
was chair of Electrical Engineering. I think it was Electrical Engineering.
Might have been Computer Science.12 He was kind of a crossover guy
12 It was Computer Science.
82 himself. Lo and behold, I got five thousand from him and five thousand
from the provost. I then had fifteen thousand dollars and then the problem
became how do we handle this money? Got to have an account. How do we
get an account? I went to the associate dean for finance and whatever in the
School of Engineering who happened to be a member of the Stanford
Historical Society.
[01:36:34] She said “Well, do it through the Stanford Historical
Society.” I should also say--I forgot something important--prior to getting
these funds, I made a pitch to the Stanford Historical Society with my little
book and I was turned down, not on the grounds of quality but because they
don’t have the funds for it. Now that I had the funds, coming back made the
whole thing a lot easier. Of course, Karen Bartholomew’s involvement would
be another little plus for me. It got started, and there you have it.
Scott: It took thirteen years but you had help with some of the research. Someone
introduced you to the archives and to those other things. Did you do all the
writing? All the editing?
Cottle: [01:37:41] Well no. I had [editorial] work from Rocky Nilan, who is a former
archivist at Stanford. She was the person who was riding herd on me in an
editorial sort of way. She herself has a PhD in history, probably of history of
California. She knew a lot of things and corrected me on a few items and so
on. Let’s say that I think I wrote an initial draft of everything and maybe it
got wordsmithed around and so on.
Scott: Amazing. Is every street mentioned?
83 Cottle: [01:38:36] Yes, I would say so. It’s a little difficult to pin down what is meant
by every street. The fact of the matter is that in the first edition, I left out a
couple of streets by accident. I didn’t know about them. I thought that I had
visited every street on campus. There’s a little one called Rosse Lane over in
the Escondido Village named after Jim Rosse who was a provost at one time.
There’s also something called Pine Hill Court which is just the opposite side
of Pine Hill Road, across Bowdoin on campus, a tiny, little--almost like a
driveway.
[01:39:33] Then there was some pressure brought to bear to include
streets in other places. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember whether the
first edition included all the street names in Stanford West Apartments. If it
did, that was under a certain amount of duress because those are actually in
Palo Alto.
Scott: Sand Hill Road is the dividing line, right?
Cottle: [01:40:11] Yes. You know the Hoover Pavilion?
Scott: Yes.
Cottle: [01:40:17] That’s in Palo Alto too. I’m not kidding, at least that’s the address
they use. Anyway, then for the second edition, I was asked to put in some--
there are three streets up in the Stanford Hills section of Menlo Park near the
golf course and a few streets--couple of streets--in the research park--well
Hansen being one of them--Hansen Way. He was an important one. Porter
Drive is a little questionable. Porter was a mayor of Palo Alto and was quite
instrumental in getting Page Mill Road put in the way it was. That one got in
there as well.
84 Scott: Now who’s putting this pressure on you? You said there was a little pressure
to get Stanford West.
Cottle: [01:41:22] It was pretty much Karen. Karen was the editor on the revised
edition.
Scott: That’s quite a project. Are you getting royalties?
Cottle: [01:41:37] Nobody gets royalties from Stanford Historical Society books.
What you get is a certain percentage of the print run. On the first print run,
which was about two thousand four hundred copies, I got ten percent of
that. Then I was given a list of people that I must give it to, which I did. That
still left me with a couple hundred copies of the book. On the second
edition, I got five percent of the print run and it’s a smaller print run but it’s
enough.
Scott: That’s amazing. Have you got any other similar projects in your back pocket?
Cottle: [01:42:32] First of all, I’ve been working for eleven years with another man
on a textbook, which I hope will be finished sometime in this calendar year.
This is not history. This is just a textbook in optimization.
I have a hobby and I have a wish. I have a hobby of raising cacti and
succulents, which I started around 2005, around the time I retired. What I
would love is to be able to put together a guidebook for Stanford’s Arizona
Cactus Garden.
Scott: Over there near the...?
Cottle: [01:43:29] Near the mausoleum.
Scott: Mausoleum. I was going to ask did you know about it?
Cottle: [01:43:32] Yes, I do know about it.
85 Scott: When I was last there, which is a few years ago, it was in great disrepair.
Cottle: [01:43:39] It’s not in such disrepair right now.
Scott: It’s not?
Cottle: [01:43:43] No. I think I can recommend that you see it again. There is a
group that meets there once a month to do caretaking. Curiously enough,
there’s a woman who’s sort of in charge of all of that who is the person who
provided a lot of the photographs that went into the street names book.
Scott: What’s her name?
Cottle: [01:44:10] Her name is Christy Smith. You know her?
Scott: No.
Cottle: [01:44:14] Very nice person. She is the kind of caretaker, chief honcho of that
Arizona Garden. Unfortunately, first of all, there are people in this institution
who know a heck of a lot more about those plants over there than I do, but
you may have noticed when you were there that there’s no signage. There’s
no identification of the plants.
Scott: It was in disrepair. This could be ten or fifteen years ago. It was ugly.
Cottle: [01:45:04] Apparently the buildings and grounds people or some
policymakers in the university do not want to have any plant identification
there for fear that those plants, in the case where they are rare plants, will be
dug up and taken away by bad people. That’s kind of sad I would say.
Scott: So nobody gets to know what they are because...?
Cottle: [01:45:43] Yes. I happen to have a thing that I guess was put together by
Christy Smith, a pdf file that has the numbers of all the beds. There’re a lot
of beds over there and there is some identification in this file, but it’s not
86 something that I dare put in print for the public until such time as that policy
changes. But I’d love to do that. That would be a lot of fun.
Scott: Well I think your group that meets monthly should just revolt and put names
down there. Probably no one in the university would notice because they
don’t take care of it.
Cottle: [01:46:30] It’s really interesting how little known that place is and what a
lovely spot it is now.
Scott: Well OK. I can walk over there; that’s a good plan. I want to sort of pull
things together here. We had been discussing facts and occasionally you will
offer some opinions or something, but I’d like to invite you to reflect on
your career and on the university and see whether there are things I’ve
missed, things that....
Cottle: [01:47:17] You brought up the subject of changes in the university. In the old
days, [laughter]--when I first came here--you could drive to almost any place
on campus. Now we have all these bollards and barriers and this and that and
I can understand the thinking behind that but that, in itself, is a big change.
My colleague, George Dantzig, who got lured from Berkeley to come to
Stanford, used to joke that the reason he came to Stanford is that he could
park next to the building. When we first came, if you look at the material that
I gave you or you returned it, didn’t you?
Scott: I did.
Cottle: [01:48:14] There’s a picture of the OR House, so-called. The OR House later
became part of the Law School parking lot. Then it became part of the
Munger dormitories. That’s the sad history of that little piece of ground. That
87 is one of the things that has changed a lot. Some streets have changed in
ways that are, I would say, recorded in the book. Of course, lots and lots of
buildings. It goes without saying. When I first came to Stanford, I think I
mentioned to you in our first interview that I wasn’t particularly keen about
coming to Stanford when I had the offer. The reason primarily was that the
[Engineering] Library here was a joke.
[01:49:35] It was in the basement of Cubberley Hall and it was a
nothing. Just by comparison with Berkeley, it was just terrible. That changed
and it got very much better when the Terman Engineering Center went up
and the library was installed there. Of course, by that time, I had been here at
Stanford for probably twelve years. OR moved around a lot. I think that one
of the things that will be very interesting to see is what has become of the
mathematics library. The math library was on the fourth floor of Math
Corner.
[01:51:04] That got moved out in order to make more office space
for the Mathematics Department and the collection or a good part of it was
moved over to the Falconer Library which is really biology. It’s kind of kitty
corner from Math Corner. There is a building under construction and I guess
will be open fairly soon, the old Swain Chemistry Building, which was badly
damaged in the 1989 earthquake. That is going to have the Math Library in it
and maybe even a kind of a Science Library.
Scott: Where is that going to be? If you’re standing at Math Corner, is that across
Serra Street?
Cottle: [01:52:00] It’s across Serra Street and to the left...
88 Scott: I do know that building.
Cottle: [01:52:05] Yes, yes. It’s an old building. It was fenced off for a long, long
time. It was badly damaged in the earthquake.
Scott: Yes. And they’re doing a lot of work over there now too.
Cottle: [01:52:17] There have been some nice, new things like the extension of the
art museum and the Anderson Collection over there. That’s great. The Bing
Auditorium, if it only had some good acoustics, it would be great. It’s a
handsome building, I must say. Those are nice things.
Scott: Let me focus this if you can take a few more minutes--is this too late? I’m
aware of the time. I’m going to ask for your reflections and maybe I’ll sort of
list off the things I was going to ask and you can respond as you wish.
Accomplishments you’re most proud of, the biggest challenges working at
Stanford, how you think Stanford is different from peer universities and why
are they different, how a Stanford career impacted your outside activities and
how your personal family life impacted your career? Now those may not all
be important enough for you to want to reflect on. Why don’t I go back and
start and you can decide what you want to say.
Cottle: [01:53:34] Let’s take the first one.
Scott: Accomplishment you’re most proud of.
Cottle: [01:53:39] I guess probably other than siring a couple of wonderful kids, I
would say that that book that I wrote with a couple of my students certainly
has been important for me. There are things that I would like to accomplish
that I wouldn’t even begin to try to describe to you. They’re in the realm of
mathematics. I still hope to have enough time to get to them.
89 Scott: How about the biggest challenges you’ve had working at Stanford? Maybe
there are none. It’s just been easy.
Cottle: [01:54:47] No, it is--I must have challenges. I can tell you right now the
biggest challenge that faces me is the fact that I’ve got glaucoma and so
reading is--I’ve got glaucoma and cataracts. [laughter] Cataracts you can take
of surgically and I hope to do that eventually. But glaucoma’s another matter.
Reading is hard for me and yet it’s an important part of what one does in this
line of work.
Scott: That’s terrible.
Cottle: [01:55:42] Now what else?
Scott: How is Stanford different from its peer universities and why is it different?
What explains those differences?
Cottle: [01:55:59] It’s a very different history I think. The Stanford family and their
concept of everything I think makes the University quite special. Quite
honestly, I don’t know a good answer to your question because I haven’t
spent long periods of time in other American universities, with the exception
of Harvard. I think that my days at Harvard were so different and my
circumstances were so different that it probably doesn’t make sense to speak
of that. I like this place.
I want to come back to the things I’m most proud of. I’m very proud
of some of my students, well these two13 that did the book with me for a
start and some others.
13 The two were Jong-Shi Pang and Richard E. Stone.
90 [01:57:30] There’s one that really got me kind of stirred up right now
and that is--I think I may have told you about this one student of mine that
passed away. Yes, he died on the 31st of July at the age of 41. He was at the
University of Chicago and doing very well. It’s sad enough but I’m in the
position of having to write an obituary article about him for one of our
professional publications and it has me concerned that I do a good job of
that. It’s tough. How about some more questions?
Scott: How did your personal family life impact your career, if at all?
Cottle: [01:58:28] Oh I would say quite a lot. I think I told you the influence that
brought me here to Stanford. That’s one thing. I think that I’ve tried to be a
good husband and parent and devote a lot of time to the family and to my
mother, by the way, who lived with us for twenty-three years in our house,
not just here in town but in our house. That was a bit of a challenge.
Anyhow, I think that family life has had a major influence on me.
Scott: What have I missed? Do you have any information or analysis about the
Stanford you know? Is there something that I haven’t asked about?
Cottle: [01:59:52] I will tell you one little personal tidbit. In addition to the cacti and
succulents I’ve, for a long time, had an interest in woodworking. I’ve built
some of the furniture that’s in our house, a little bit of it, lot of bookshelves
for sure. I have also kind of served as a handyman for various neighbors and
friends. Just the other day, the subject of grab bars in showers came up and I
did a fair amount of that kind of thing for people, elderly folks who needed
somebody to install one of those. I used to do things like that. In our house,
when we built the house, I built the fence that goes around the house.
91 [02:01:04] That took several weeks. This was back in the late sixties and it
was quite an undertaking because, for the most part, it was done
singlehandedly. [laughter]
Scott: Did you have to dig holes to put in the...
Cottle: [02:01:23] No, I confess that I had the posts professionally done. I did all the
rest but the rest is quite a lot.
Scott: That’s right. [laughter] Great. Anything else?
Cottle: [02:01:38] I think that’s enough. I think that’s enough.
Scott: Thank you very much. This has been such a treat for me. It’s just been really
interesting.
Cottle: [02:01:46] Thank you. Thank you.
[End of Interview with Richard W. Cottle, August 14, 2015]
92 Richard Warren “Dick” Cottle Curriculum Vitae
EDUCATION
AB 1957 Mathematics, Harvard College AM 1958 Mathematics, Harvard University PhD 1964 Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley Dissertation: Nonlinear Programs with Positively Bounded Jacobians
EMPLOYMENT
1957-58 Teaching Fellow in Mathematics, Harvard University 1958-60 Instructor in Mathematics, Middlesex School, Concord, Massachusetts 1960-61 Computer Programmer, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley 1961-64 Computer Programmer, Operations Research Center, University of California, Berkeley 1963 (Summer) The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, Consultant 1964-66 Member of Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey 1966-67 Acting Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 1967-69 Assistant Professor, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California 1969-73 Associate Professor, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California 1973- Professor, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California 1988-90 Associate Chairman, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California
93 1990-96 Chairman, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California 1997-99 Associate Chairman, Department of Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, California 2000-05 Professor, Department of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California
MEMBERSHIPS
American Mathematical Society 1958 Mathematical Association of America 1958 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 1966 Operations Research Society of America 1962–1995 The Institute of Management Sciences 1967–1995 INFORMS 1995 Mathematical Programming Society 1970 Gesellschaft fur Mathematik, O konomie, und Operations Research 1984–1998 International Linear Algebra Society 1989–2005.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Editorial Boards
Associate Editor, OPERATIONS RESEARCH (1969-1978) Associate Editor, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING (1971-1979) Associate Editor, SIAM JOURNAL ON APPLIED MATHEMATICS (1972-1975) Associate Editor, SIAM JOURNAL ON CONTROL AND OPTIMIZATION (1976- 1979) Associate Editor, SIAM JOURNAL ON MATRIX ANALYSIS AND APPLICATIONS (1993-1999) Associate Editor, LINEAR ALGEBRA AND ITS APPLICATIONS (1976-1983) Associate Editor, RAIRO-RECHERCHE OPE´ RATIONNELLE (1975-1993)
94 Associate Editor, JOURNAL OF OPTIMIZATION THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (1979-1980, 2010-) Advisory Editor, LINEAR ALGEBRA AND ITS APPLICATIONS (1984-2004) Editor-in-Chief, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING (1980-1985) Editor-in-Chief, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING STUDIES (1980-1985) Member, Editorial Board, IOS Press, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Conference Organization
Co-Director, NATO Conference on “Applications of Optimization Methods for Large- Scale Resource-Allocation Problems,” Elsinore, Denmark, July 5-9, 1971. Chairman, Coordinating Committee, Eighth International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Stanford, California, August 27-31, 1973. Chairman, Organizing Committee, Symposium on Nonlinear Programming, American Mathematical Society Meeting, New York, March 23-24, 1975. Co-Director, Course on “Variational Inequalities and Complementarity Problems,” Erice (Sicily), Italy, June 19-30, l978. Co-Organizer, Symposium on Fixed Point Algorithms and Complementarity, Southampton, England, July 3-5, 1979. Co-Organizer, Trilateral Workshop on Mathematical Programming, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 1-3, 1981. Co-organizer, Workshop on Iterative Methods for Mathematical Programs, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 1986. Organizer, International Workshop on Complementarity, Stanford University, July 1990. Organizer, International Workshop on Complementarity, Stanford University, July 1992. Co-organizer, 4th International Conference on Complementarity Problems, Stanford University, August 2005.
Conference Program Committee Membership
IX. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Budapest, August, 1976. International Congress on Mathematical Programming, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 6-8,
95 1981. SIAM Linear Algebra Meeting, 1982. SIAM Summer Meeting, 1982. XI. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Bonn, West Germany, August, 1982. XII. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Cambridge, MA, August 1985. International Conference on Numerical Optimization and Applications, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China, June 1986. XIII. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Tokyo, Japan, August- September 1988. Second International Conference on Numerical Optimization and Applications, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China, June 1990. XIV. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Amsterdam, Netherlands, August 1991. XV. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1994.
Conference Session Organization
Chairman, Cluster on Nonlinear Programming, TIMS International Meeting, Hawaii, June, 1979. Chairman, Mini-Symposium on Triangulations and Subdivisions, SIAM Symposium on Discrete Applied Mathematics, Cambridge, MA, June, 1983. Chairman, Session on Quadratic Programming and Linear Complementarity, ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Orlando, FL, November 1983. Chairman, Session on Quadratic Programming Computation, ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, May 1984. Chairman, Session on Mathematical Programming, IX. Symposium on Operations Research, Osnabruck, West Germany, August 1984. Chairman, Session on Linear Complementarity, ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Boston, MA, April/May 1985. Chairman, Cluster on Linear Programming, Linear Complementarity, and Fixed Point Methods, ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 1986.
96 Chairman, Session on Linear Complementarity and Related Problems, ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, October 1990. Chairman, Session on Complementarity and Related Problems, TIMS/ORSA National Meeting, Nashville, TN, May 1991. Chairman, Session on Variational Inequality Problems, ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Anaheim, CA, November 1991. Chairman, Session on Complementarity, INFORMS National Meeting, Montreal, Canada, May 1997. Chairman, Four sessions on linear complementarity, International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 1997.
Committee Chairmanship
Executive Committee, Mathematical Programming Society (1973-1976). International Visiting Committee on Operations Research, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, December 1975. Constitution Committee, Mathematical Programming Society. Committee for George B. Dantzig Prize, Mathematical Programming Society. Membership Committee, Mathematical Programming Society. National Science Foundation Fellowship Panel, February 1985. 1991 A.W. Tucker Prize Committee, Mathematical Programming Society.
Committee Membership
Representative, Operations Research Society of America to Mathematics Section of American Association for the Advancement of Science Ad Hoc Advisory Panel on Applied Mathematics, National Science Foundation, October 27-29, 1976. Technical Review Board, Mathematics Research Center, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, May 26-27, 1977. Army Basic Research Committee, 1977-80. Council of the Mathematical Programming Society, 1977-79. Symposium Advisory Committee, Mathematical Programming Society.
97 Nominating Committee, Operations Research Society of America, 1982. National Science Foundation Fellowship Panel: February, 1983, February, 1984. INFORMS Prize Committee, INFORMS, 1995, 1996
Reviewing
Reviewer, MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS Reviewer, ZENTRALBLATT FU¨ R MATHEMATIK
Miscellaneous
Co-Director, Systems Optimization Laboratory, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University. Lecturer, SIAM Visiting Lecturer Program, 1977-78. Lecturer, Scuola Matematica Interuniversitaria. Cortona, Italy. August 1996.
LECTURES (* denotes invited lecture at a conference)
IV. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Chicago, Illinois, June 18, 1962. TIMS-ORSA Western Regional Meeting, Berkeley, California, April 10, 1963. Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, December 1963. V. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, London, England, July 9, 1964. SIGMAP Workshop on Linear Programming, IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, New York, June 14, 1966. Mobil Research Center, Princeton, New Jersey, February 24, 1967. * American Mathematical Society Summer Seminar on the Mathematics of the Decision Sciences, Stanford, California, July 24-25, 1967. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, August 7-8, 1968. Mathematics Research Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, November 19, 1968. Department of Industrial Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois, November 20, 1968. Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, November
98 21, 1968. Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, February 10, 1969. Computer Sciences Center, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, April 15, 1969. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, April 7-8, 1969. NATO Summer School on Integer and Nonlinear Programming, Bandol, France, June 8-20, 1969. Mathematical Institute, Oxford University, June 1969. The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., July 24, 1969. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J., July 25, 1969. Department of Statistics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, November 7, 1969. Department of Engineering Administration, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., February 2, 1970. Matrix Theory Conference, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, June 10, 1970. SEMA, Paris, France, September, 1970. * VII. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, The Hague, Netherlands, September 16, 1970. Institute for Mathematical Statistics and Operations Research, KTH Lyngby, Denmark, September 1970. Mathematics Department, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, September, 1970. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April, 1971. Department of Computer Science, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada, March 14, 1972. * XIX. International Meeting, Institute of Management Sciences, Houston, Texas, April 6, 1972. * XLI. National Meeting, Operations Research Society of America, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 26, 1972. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, September 12, 1973.
99 XLIV. National Meeting, Operations Research Society of America, San Diego, California, November 14, 1973. Institute for Operations Research, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, March 28, 1974. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Milan, Milan, Italy, April 2, 1974. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Milan, Milan, Italy, April 2, 1974. * Conference on Mathematical Programming and Its Applications, Rome, Italy, April 4, 1974. Istituto di Calcolo di Probabilita, University of Rome, Rome, Italy, April 5, 1974. XLV. National Meeting, Operations Research Society of America, Boston, Massachusetts, April 22, 1974. * Conference on Computing Fixed Points with Applications, Clemson, South Carolina, June 26, 1974. Kernforschungsanlage Julich, Julich, Federal Republic of Germany, October 24, 1974. Mathematisches Institut, University of Cologne, Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany, October 25, 1974. Mathematical Institute, University of Delft, Delft, The Netherlands, October 28, 1974. Department of Operations Research, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, November 11, 1974. Department of Mathematics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy, November 11, 1974. Numerical Analysis Laboratory, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, November 12, 1974. Department of Mathematics, University of Milan, Milan, Italy, November 13, 1974. Conference on Optimization and Control Theory, Oberwolfach, Federal Republic of Germany, November 18, 1974. Department of Mathematics, California State University, Hayward, California, April 23, 1975. * SIAM-SIGNUM Fall Meeting, Symposium on Optimization in Science and Engineering, San Francisco, California, December 3, 1975. Institut fur Operations Research, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, December 16, 1975. * LXXXII. Annual Meeting, American Mathematical Society, San Antonio, Texas, January 23, 1976. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 29, 1976. * Symposium on Matrix Methods in Optimization, Argonne National Laboratory,
100 Argonne, Illinois, June 15, 1976. * IX. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Budapest, Hungary, August 25, 1976. Symposium on Operations Research, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Federal Republic of Germany, September 2, 1976. * ORSA/TIMS Joint National Meeting, Miami, Florida, November 3, 1976. * Workshop on Nonlinear Programming, University of Cologne, Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany, June 27, 1977. Institut fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften, University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Federal Republic of Germany, June 30, 1977. * Nonlinear Programming Symposium 3, Madison, Wisconsin, July 11, 1977. * NATO Advanced Study Institute, “Engineering Plasticity by Mathematical Programming,” Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, August, 1977. * International Symposium on Computing Methods in Engineering and Applied Science, Versailles, France, December, 1977. * III. Symposium on Operations Research, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Federal Republic of Ger- many, September 8, 1978. * Course on Variational Inequalities and Complementarity Problems in Mathematical Physics and Economics, Erice (Sicily), Italy, June 20 & 26, 1978. * Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization, Institute for Econometrics and Operations Research, University of Bonn, Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany, September 27 and October 4, 1978. * Conference on Operations Research, Oberwolfach, Federal Republic of Germany, October 17, 1978. * Autumn Course on Systems Analysis, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, November 6 & 7, 1978. Mathematisches Institut, University of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Federal Republic of Germany, November 10, 1978. * Conference on the Mathematics of Operations Research, Lunteren, The Netherlands, January 15 & 16, 1979. Department of Computer Science, Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Federal Republic of Germany, January 23, 1979.
101 Industrieseminar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany, February 2, 1979. Institut fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften, University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Federal Republic of Germany, February 8, 1979. Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, April 5, 1979. CORE, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, April 26, 1979. Institut fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften, University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Federal Republic of Germany, May 3, 1979. * Conference on Mathematical Programming, Oberwolfach, Federal Republic of Germany, May 8, 1979. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, May 28 & 29, 1979. Technical University of Linkoping, Linkoping, Sweden, May 30, 1979. Institute of Applied Mathematics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Federal Republic of Germany, May 31, 1979. Mathematisches Institut, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Federal Republic of Germany, June 6, 1979. Mathematisches Institut, University of Cologne, Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany, June 11, 1979. * Symposium on Fixed Point Algorithms and Complementarity, Southampton, England, July 4, 1979. * X. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 28, 1979. School of Organization and Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, October 30, 1979. Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 2, 1979. Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, February 7, 1980. * TIMS/ORSA Meeting, Washington, DC, May 4, 1980. * NATO Advanced Study Institute on Generalized Concavity in Optimization and Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, August 4, 1980. * V. Symposium on Operations Research, Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany,
102 August 25, 1980. * Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization, University of Bonn, Bonn Federal Republic of Germany, August 28, 1980. * International Congress on Mathematical Programming, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 8, 1981. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Houston, Texas, October 12, 1981. Department of Mathematics, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA October 22, 1981. Graduate School of Business, University of California at Los Angeles, January 22, 1982. * XI. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany, August, 1982. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, San Diego, CA, October, 1982. IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, February 15, 1983. Bell Telephone Laboratories, West Long Branch, NJ, February 16, 1983. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Chicago, IL, April, 1983. School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, February 3, 1984. * IX. Symposium on Operations Research, Osnabruck, West Germany, August 27, 1984. * XII. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Cambridge, MA, August 7, 1985. Invited Survey. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Atlanta, GA November, 1985 * TIMS/ORSA National Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April, 1986. Colloquium Series in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Dynamics, University of California, Davis, February 19, 1987. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, April 30, 1987. AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, November 3, 1987. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, November 4, 1987. Department of Mathematical Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, November 5, 1987. Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California, Riverside,
103 December 11, 1987. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, April 14, 1988. * TIMS/ORSA National Meeting, Washington, DC, April, 1988. * XIII. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Tokyo, August 28 and September 2, 1988. * Fifth ORSA Doctoral Colloquium, Keystone, Colorado, October 22, 1988. Department of Operations Research, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, November 30, 1988. Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, May 2, 1989. * Workshop on Generalized Convexity and Fractional Programming, University of California, Riverside, October 10, 1989. * TIMS/ORSA National Meeting, Nashville, TN, May, 1991. * XIV. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Amsterdam, Netherlands, August 1991. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Anaheim, CA, November, 1991. Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, May, 1992. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Chicago, IL, May, 1993. * ORSA/TIMS National Meeting, Phoenix, AZ, November, 1993. Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley, February, 7 1994. * SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra, Snowbird, UT, June 18, 1994. Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 19, 1995. * International Conference on Complementarity Problems, Johns Hopkins University, November 1, 1995. Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, October 10, 1996. Department of Mathematics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, October 15, 1996 IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, October 18, 1996. Department of Industrial Engineering, Yuan-Ze Institute of Technology, Nei-li, Taiwan,
104 November 19, 1996. Department of Applied Mathematics, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, November 22, 1996. * Summer School on Computational Methods for Game Theory, University of Siena, May 14-15, 1997. Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, May 19, 1997. IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, April 30, 1998. Applied Mathematics Seminar, Stanford University, May 29, 1998. * 17th European Operational Research Conference, Budapest, July 18, 2000. * 17th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Atlanta, August 8, 2000. Department of Mathematics, London School of Economics, London, May 16, 2002. Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge, June 11, 2002. Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley, November 7, 2005. Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, October 10, 2008. * Dantzig Memorial Cluster, INFORMS National Meeting, Washington, DC, October 14, 2008. * 20th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Chicago, August 28, 2009. * 21st International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Berlin, August 21, 2012. * Workshop on Complementarity and its Extensions (= 5th International Conference on Complementarity Problems), Institute for Mathematical Science, National University of Singapore, December 20, 2012. * Mini symposium Linear Complementarity and Beyond, International Linear Algebra Society, Warwick, RI, June 4, 2013. * Scientific and Statistical Computing Seminar, University of Chicago, October 3, 2013. * Initiative for Computational Economics, Stanford University, July 25, 2014 * Workshop on Complementarity and its Extensions (= 6th International Conference on Complementarity Problems), Department of Mathematics, Humboldt University, Berlin, August 7, 2014.
105 * (Plenary) Dantzig Centennial Cluster, INFORMS National Meeting, San Francisco, November 11, 2014.
HONORS A.B. Cum Laude, Harvard College, 1957. Senior U.S. Scientist Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany, 1977. 1994 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize (with J.S. Pang and R.E. Stone), INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), October 31, 1995. Honored for a lifetime of achievement by the journal Computational Optimization and Applications Volume 5, Number 2 (1996). Arthur Andersen Distinguished Visitor, Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge, Easter Term, 2002. Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, Easter Term, 2002. Life Member, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, 2002. Honored on occasion of 70th birthday by the editors of Mathematical Programming Volume 101, Number 1 (2004), edited by D. Ralph, J.S. Pang, and S. Scholtes. INFORMS Fellow, November 6, 2006. Honored on occasion of 75th birthday by special issue of the Journal of Global Optimization, Volume 53, Number 1 (2012) , edited by S. Schaible and J.C. Yao. Tradition of Excellence Award, Oak Park & River Forest High School, Oak Park, Illinois, 2014.
PUBLICATIONS AND RESEARCH
Books
BK–1 (With J-S. Pang and R.E. Stone) The Linear Complementarity Problem, Academic Press, Boston, 1992. (Revised Edition in Classics in Applied Mathematics Series, SIAM, Philadelphia 2009.) BK–2 (With M.N. Thapa) Linear and Nonlinear Optimization, Springer, New York, to appear 2016.
106 Edited Books
EB–1 (With J. Krarup) Optimization Methods for Resource Allocation Problems, Proceedings of the NATO Conference on Applications of Optimization Methods for Large-Scale Resource-Allocation Problems, English Universities Press, London, 1974. EB–2 (With C.E. Lemke) Proceedings of the SIAM-AMS Symposium on Nonlinear Programming, SIAM- AMS Proceedings, Vol. IX, American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. EB–3 (With M.L. Balinski) Complementarity and Fixed Point Problems, Mathematical Programming Study 7, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1978. EB–4 (With F. Giannessi and J.L. Lions) Variational Inequalities and Complementarity Problems, John Wiley & Sons, London, 1980. EB–5 (With M.L. Kelmanson and B. Korte) Mathematical Programming, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1984. EB–6 Mathematical Programming Essays in Honor of George B. Dantzig (two volumes), Mathematical Programming Studies 24 and 25, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1985. EB–7 (With J. Kyparisis and J-S. Pang) Variational Inequality and Complementarity Problems, North- Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1990. See Mathematical Programming, Series B Volume 48, No. 2 and No. 3. EB–8 (With D. Goldfarb and A.J. Hoffman) Studies in Linear and Integer Programming and Studies in Nonlinear Programming, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1993. See Mathematical Programming, Series B Volume 62, No. 1 and No. 2. EB–9 (with K.J. Arrow, B.C. Eaves, and I. Olkin) Education in a Research University, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1996. EB–10 The Basic George B. Dantzig, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2003.
Journal Articles
JA–1 “Symmetric Dual Quadratic Programs,” Quarterly of Applied Mathematics 21 (1963), 237–243. JA–2 “Note on a Fundamental Theorem in Quadratic Programming,” Journal of the Society
107 for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 12 (1964), 663–665. JA–3 (With G.B. Dantzig and E. Eisenberg) “Symmetric Dual Nonlinear Programs,” Pacific Journal of Mathematics 15 (1965), 809–812. JA–4 “Nonlinear Programs with Positively Bounded Jacobians,” Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 14 (1966), 147–158. JA–5 (With B. Mond) “Self-Duality in Mathematical Programming,” Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 14 (1966), 420–423. JA–6 “On the Convexity of Quadratic Forms over Convex Sets,” Operations Research 15 (1967), 170–173. JA–7 (With G.B. Dantzig) “Complementary Pivot Theory of Mathematical Programming,” Linear Algebra and its Applications 1 (1968), 103–125. JA–8 “Comments on the Note by Kortanek and Jeroslow ’Some Classical Methods in Constrained Optimization and Positively Bounded Jacobians’,” Operations Research 15 (1967), 969–970. JA–9 “On a Problem in Linear Inequalities,” Journal of the London Mathematical Society 43 (1968), 378–384. JA–10 (With G.B. Dantzig) “A Generalization of the Linear Complementarity Problem,” Journal of Combinatorial Theory 8 (1970), 79–90. JA–11 (With G.J. Habetler and C.E. Lemke) “On Classes of Copositive Matrices,” Linear Algebra and its Applications 3 (1970), 295–310. JA–12 (With J. Ferland) “Matrix Theoretic Criteria for the Quasi-Convexity and Pseudo- Convexity of Quadratic Functions,” Linear Algebra and its Applications 5 (1972), 123– 136. JA–13 (With J. Ferland) “On Pseudo-Convex Functions of Nonnegative Variables,” Mathematical Programming 1 (1971), 95-101. JA–14 (With A.F. Veinott, Jr.) “Polyhedral Sets Having a Least Element,” Mathematical Programming 3 (1972), 238–249. JA–15 “Solution to G. Maier’s Problem on Parametric Linear Complementarity Problems,” SIAM Review 15 (1973), 381–384. JA–16 “Monotone Solutions of the Parametric Linear Complementarity Problem,” Mathematical Programming 3 (1972), 210–224. JA–17 “Manifestations of the Schur Complement,” Linear Algebra and its Applications 8
108 (1974), 189–211. JA–18 (With R.S. Sacher) “On the Solution of Large, Structured Linear Complementarity Problems: The Tridiagonal Case,” Applied Mathematics and Optimization 3 (1977), 321– 340. JA–19 (With G.H. Golub and R.S. Sacher) “On the Solution of Large, Structured Linear Complementarity Problems: The Block Partitioned Case,” Applied Mathematics and Optimization 4 (1978), 347–363. JA–20 “Solution Rays for a Class of Complementarity Problems,” Mathematical Programming Study 1 (1974), 59–70. JA–21 “Three Remarks About Two Papers on Quadratic Forms,” Zeitschrift fur Operations Research 19 (1975), 123–124. JA–22 (With J.S. Pang) “On Solving Linear Complementarity Problems as Linear Programs,” Mathematical Programming Study 7, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978, pp. 88–107. JA–23 (With J.S. Pang) “A Least Element Theory of Solving Linear Complementarity Problems as Linear Programs,” Mathematics of Operations Research 3 (1978), 155-170. JA–24 (With A. Djang) “Algorithmic Equivalence in Quadratic Programming I, A Least- Distance Programming Problem,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 28 (1979), 275–301. JA–25 “On Manifestations of the Schur Complement,” Rendiconti del Seminario Matematico e Fisico di Milano 45 (1975), 31–40. JA–26 (With Y.-Y. Chang) “Least Index Resolution of Degeneracy in Quadratic Programming,” Mathematical Programming 18 (1980), 127–137. JA–27 (With M. Aganagi ) “A Note on Q-Matrices,” Mathematical Programming 16 (1979), 374–377. JA–28 (With S.M. Gorelick and I. Remson) “Management Model of a Groundwater System with a Transient Pollutant Source,” Journal of Water Resources 15 (l979), 1243– 1249. JA–29 “Observations on a Class of Nasty Linear Complementarity Problems,” Discrete Applied Mathematics 2 (1980), 89–111. JA–30 (With R. von Randow and R.E. Stone) “On Spherically Convex Sets and Q- matrices,” Linear Algebra and its Applications 41 (1981), 73–80.
109 JA–31 “Completely-Q Matrices,” Mathematical Programming 19 (1980), 347–351. JA–32 (With J-S. Pang) “On the Convergence of a Block Successive Overrelaxation Method for a Class of Linear Complementarity Problems,” Mathematical Programming Study 17 (1982), 126–138. JA–33 (With R.E. Stone) “On the Uniqueness of Solutions to Linear Complementarity Problems,” Mathematical Programming 27 (1983), 191–213. JA–34 “Minimal Triangulation of the 4-Cube,” Discrete Mathematics 40 (1982), 25–29. JA–35 (With S.G. Duvall and K. Zikan) “A Lagrangean Relaxation Algorithm for the Constrained Matrix Problem,” Naval Research Logistics Quarterly 33 (1986), 55–76. JA–36 (With M.N. Broadie) “A Note on Triangulating the 5-Cube,” Discrete Mathematics 52 (1984), 39–49. JA–37 (With M. Aganagi ) “A Constructive Characterization of Q0 -matrices with Nonnegative Principal Minors,” Mathematical Programming 37 (1987), 223–231. JA–38 (With J.-S. Pang and V. Venkateswaran) “Sufficient Matrices and the Linear Complementarity Problem,” Linear Algebra and Its Applications 114/115 (1989), 231– 249. JA–39 “The Principal Pivoting Method Revisited,” Mathematical Programming, Series B 48 (1990), 369–385. JA–40 (With Y-Y. Chang) “Least-Index Resolution of Degeneracy in Linear Complementarity Problems with Sufficient Matrices,” SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications 13 (1992), 1131–1141. JA–41 (With J-C. Yao) “Pseudo-monotone Complementarity Problems in Hilbert Space,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 75 (1992), 281–295. JA–42 (With S-M. Guu) “Two Characterizations of Sufficient Matrices,” Linear Algebra and Its Applications 170 (1992), 65–74. JA–43 (With S-M. Guu) “On a Subclass of P0, Linear Algebra and Its Applications 223/224 (1995), 325–335. JA–44 “Quartic Barriers,” Computational Optimization and Applications 12 (1999), 81–105. JA–45 (With D.M. Bravata, B.C. Eaves, and I. Olkin) “Measuring Conformability of Probabilities,” Statistics & Probability Letters 52 (2001) 321–327. JA–46 (With I. Adler and S. Verma) “Sufficient Matrices Belong to L,” Mathematical Programming 106 (2006), 391–401.
110 JA–47 “George B. Dantzig: A Legendary Life in Mathematical Programming,” Mathematical Programming 105 (2006) 1–8. JA–48 “George B. Dantzig: Operations Research Icon,” Operations Research 53 (2005), 892–898.. JA–49 (With I. Olkin) “Estimating Ordered Parameters by Linear Programming,” Statistical Planning and Inference 138 (2008) 2622–2633. JA–50 (With I. Olkin) “Closed-form Solution of a Maximization Problem,” Journal of Global Optimization 42 (2008), 609–617. JA–51 (With I. Adler and S. Verma) “New Characterizations of Row Sufficient Matrices,” Linear Algebra and its Applications 430 (2009), 2950–2960. JA–52 ”A Field Guide to the Matrix Classes Found in the Literature of the Linear Complementarity Problem,” Journal of Global Optimization 46 (2010), 571–580. JA–53 “A Brief History of the International Symposia on Mathematical Programming,” Mathematical Programming, Series B 125 (2010), 207–233.
Conference Proceedings Articles and Book Chapters
CP–1 (With G.B. Dantzig) “Positive (Semi-) Definite Programming,” in (J. Abadie, ed.) Nonlinear Programming, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1967, pp. 55–73. CP–2 “The Principal Pivoting Method of Quadratic Programming” in (G.B. Dantzig and A.F. Veinott, Jr., eds.) Mathematics of the Decision Sciences, Part I, American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 1968, pp. 144–162. CP–3 (With G.J. Habetler and C.E. Lemke) “Quadratic Forms Semi-Definite over Convex Cones,” in (H.W. Kuhn, ed.) Proceedings of the Princeton Symposium on Mathematical Programming, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1970, pp. 551–565. CP–4 (With W.C. Mylander, III) “Ritter’s Cutting Plane Method for Nonconvex Quadratic Programming,” in (J. Abadie, ed.) Integer and Nonlinear Programming, North- Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, pp. 257–283. CP–5 “Complementarity and Variational Problems,” Symposia Mathematica XIX, Academic Press, Lon- don and New York, 1976, pp. 177–208. CP–6 “Computational Experience with Large-Scale Linear Complementarity Problems,”
111 in (S. Karamardian, ed.) Fixed Points, Academic Press, New York, 1977, pp. 281-313. CP–7 “On Minkowski Matrices in the Linear Complementarity Problem,” Proceedings of the Conference on Optimization Theory and Optimal Control (Oberwolfach, Germany, November 1974), Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 477, Springer- Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1975, pp. 18–26. CP–8 (With M.S. Goheen), “A Special Class of Large Quadratic Programs,” in (O.L. Mangasarian, R.R. Meyer, and S.M. Robinson, eds.) Nonlinear Programming 3, Academic Press, New York, 1978, p. p. 361–390. CP–9 “Fundamentals of Quadratic Programming and Linear Complementarity,” in (M.Z. Cohn and G. Maier, eds.) Engineering Plasticity by Mathematical Programming, Pergamon Press, New York, 1979, pp. 293–323. CP–10 “Numerical Methods for Complementarity Problems in Engineering and Applied Science,” in (R. Glowinski and J.L. Lions, eds.) Computing Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, 1977, I, (Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 704) Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1979, 37–52. CP–11 “Some Recent Developments in Linear Complementarity Theory,” in (R.W. Cottle, F. Giannessi, and J.L. Lions, eds.) Variational Inequalities and Complementarity Problems: Theory and Applications, John Wiley & Sons, London, 1980, pp. 97–104. CP–12 (With S. Schaible) “On Pseudoconvex Quadratic Forms,” in (E.F. Beckenbach, ed.) General Inequalities, II, Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on General Inequalities (Oberwolfach 1978), Birkhäuser, Basel, 1980, pp. 81–88. CP–13 (With R. von Randow) “A Theorem on the Partitioning of Simplotopes and its Application to a Property of Q-Matrices,” in (W. Forster, ed.) Numerical Solution of Highly Nonlinear Problems, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1980, pp. 331–335. CP–14 “Application of a Block Successive Overrelaxation Method to a Class of Constrained Matrix Problems,” in (R.W. Cottle, M.L. Kelmanson, and B. Korte, eds.) Mathematical Programming, North- Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 89–104. CP–15 “Linear Complementarity Since1978,” in (F. Giannessi and A. Maugeri, eds.) Variational Analysis and Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2005, pp. 239–257.
112 CP–16 (With G. Infanger) “Harry M. Markowitz and the Early History of Quadratic Programming,” in (J. Guerard, ed.) The Handbook of Portfolio Construction: Contemporary Applications of Markowitz Techniques. Springer, New York, Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, 2010, pp. 179–211. CP-17 “William Karush and the KKT Theorem,” in (M. Grotschel, ed.) Optimization Stories, Documenta Mathematica, Bielefeld, Germany, 2012, pp. 255–269.
Technical Reports (Not Published Elsewhere)
TR–1 “A Theorem of Fritz John in Mathematical Programming,” RAND Corporation Memo, RM-3858- PR, 1963. TR–2 (With M. Aganagi ) “On Q-Matrices,” Technical Report SOL 78-9, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, September, 1978. TR–3 (With R. von Randow) “On Q-Matrices, Centroids, and Simplotopes,” Technical Report 79-10, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, June, 1979. TR–4 (With Karel Zikan) “The Box Method for Linear Programming: Part I – Basic Theory,” Technical Report SOL 87-6, Systems Optimization Laboratory, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, June 1987. TR–5 (With Karel Zikan) “The Box Method for Linear Programming: Part II – Treatment of Problems in Standard Form with Explicitly Bounded Variables,” Technical Report SOL 87-9, Systems Optimization Laboratory, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, July 1987. TR–6 (With S-M. Guu) “On Processing a Class of Linear Complementarity Problems by a Perturbation Method,” Technical Report SOL 93-2, Systems Optimization Laboratory, Department of Operations Research, Stanford University, April 1993. TR–7 “On Dodging Degeneracy in Linear Programming,” Manuscript, Department of Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research, Stanford University, July 1997.
Manuscripts (Work in Progress)
MS–1 (With I. Adler) “On Matrix Classes and Lemke’s Algorithms for the Linear
113 Complementarity Problem“. MS–2 (With I. Adler and J.S. Pang) “Three Solution Properties of a Class of LCPs: Sparsity, Elusiveness, and Strongly Polynomial Computability,” Mathematical Programming. To appear.
Book Reviews BR-1 Operations Research: Process and Strategy, Science 149 (August 13, 1972), 737-738. BR-2 Quadratic Programming, Operations Research 14 (1966), 182-184. BR-3 Nonlinear Programming, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control AC-17:4 (August, 1972) 588-589. BR-4 Linear Programming, Journal of Quality Technology 6 (1974), 213-214. BR-5 Methods of Linear and Quadratic Programming, Interfaces 6:1 (Part 1) (1975) 88-91. BR-6 Homotopy Methods and Global Convergence, American Scientist 72:4, (July-August, 1984) 408-409. BR-7 Introduction to Linear and Convex Programming, American Scientist 75:4, (July- August, 1987) 437. BR-8 Mathematical Programming, Zeitschrift fur Operations Research 32:2 (1988) 109-110. BR-9 Linear Complementarity, Linear and Nonlinear Programming, ZOR (Zeitschrift fur Operations Research), 35:2 (1991) 170-172. BR-10 Linear Programs and Related Problems, SIAM Review 36 (1994) 666-668. BR-11 Linear Programming 1: Introduction, Zentralblatt fur Mathematik 883/08 (1998) 580-581. [Abstract number 90090.] BR-12 Primal-Dual Interior-Point Methods, INFOR 37 (1999) 404-407. BR-13 Numerical Optimization, SIAM Review 46 (2004) 568-571. BR-14 Linear Programming with MATLAB, Optimization Methods and Software 23:5 (2008) 821-825. BR-15 Computational Aspects of General Equilibrium Theory, The Economic Record 86 (2010) 296-298. BR-16 Rational Action, Interfaces. To appear.
114 Other Publications
OP–1 Stanford Street Names: A Pocket Guide, Stanford Historical Society, Stanford, California, 2005. (Revised and updated edition, 2014.) OP–2 “Gentle soul welcomed me into his research world,” OR/MS Today, August 2005. OP–3 (With Margaret H. Wright) “Remembering George Dantzig,” SIAM News 39:3, April 2006, pp. 2–3. OP–4 (With Ellis Johnson and Roger Wets) “George B. Dantzig (1914–2005),” Notices of the American Mathematical Society 54:3 (March) 2007, pp. 344–362. OP–5 In Memoriam: Che-Lin Su (1974–2015), SIAG/OPT Views and News 23:2 (November) 2015, pp. 14–16.
115 116 Index
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Arrow, Kenneth Joseph “Ken” (1921- ) Dantzig, George Bernard (1914-2005) equilibrium theory ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich, Switzerland Gibbons, James F. Golub, Gene H. (1932-2007) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Kimball, Margaret “Maggie” Lieberman, Gerald J. “Jerry” (1925-1999) Linear Complementarity Problem, The by Richard W. Cottle, Jong-Shi Pang, Richard E. Stone Manne, Alan S. (1925-2005) Middlesex School, Concord, MA Olkin, Ingram (1924- ) Stanford Historical Society Stanford Street Names: A Pocket Guide, by Richard W. Cottle Stanford Street Names: A Pocket Guide. Revised and Updated, by Richard W. Cottle Stanford University Stanford University--Arizona Garden Stanford University--Engineering and Economic Systems, Department of Stanford University--Engineering, School of Stanford University--Industrial Engineering, Department of Stanford University--Operations Research, Program in University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley--Operations Research Center University of California, Berkeley--Radiation Laboratory Veinott, Arthur F. “Pete” Jr. (1934-2012) Wagner, Harvey (1931- ) Wolfe, Philip Starr “Phil” (1927- )
117