Author: Ahmet Yukselturk

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Etymology of some IE/OR terms

We communicate with words. Each word has its own history, also each word triggers different concepts in everybody’s mind. But we are not fully aware of this. For an example you can watch this part of Douglas Hofstadter’s talk. In this...

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Psychology and OR

I read an old letter from Operations Research by Creelman and Wallen: “The Role of Psychology in Operations Research” (1958) Authors try to show how psychologists can be useful and give four examples: the formulation of problem, the development and solution of...

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Nanotechnology at INFORMS Conferences

Nanotechnology is science, engineering, and technology conducted at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers. (nano.gov) Developments in this area started after invention of scanning tunneling microscope in 1981, concept of manipulating matter at nanoscale were developed earlier. Most people cite Feynman’s...

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Some Recent Metaheuristics

After reading this blog post, I thought it would be a good idea to discuss some new metaheuristics inspired by nature. 1 – Spiral Optimization Developed by Keiichiro Yasuda and Kenichi Tamura in 2011. They approximated focused spiral phenomena to logarithmic...

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First Instance of Duality in Nonlinear Programming

I always wondered “Why would someone try to construct a dual problem?” When I was doing research for my past blog post “Forgotten Scientists“, I accidentally found my answer. Kuhn says that duality should have these two elements: (a) a pair...

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Reference Journey

Couple of days ago I wondered what will happen if I would trace back references of a randomly chosen OR paper. So, I selected article #7 from March/April 2012 issue of Operations Research journal and started investigating: Jonathan Kluberg and Georgia...

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Forgotten Scientists

“No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” – Stigler’s law of eponymy. Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of “Stigler’s law”, consciously making “Stigler’s law” exemplify Stigler’s law. (Stigler’s law of eponymy – Wikipedia) Why this happens? Most...

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Role of computers in application of OR

At the beginning 1900’s mathematical tools to formulate decision problems were available, but lack of computational power prevented us from applying these concepts to large real life systems. Poptech recently shared a list of computers developed between 1938 – 1988. It...