Jewish Members of the IFORS Hall of Fame

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Listed below are the inaugural members of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (IFORS) Hall of Fame who were, or are, Jewish or of Jewish descent, as noted. The inaugural inductees represent the pioneers of the field of operations research, a mathematical and computational discipline concerned with the optimal solution of complex problems in management science.

George B. Dantzig
Richard Bellman
Leonid Kantorovich
Ralph Gomory¹
Kenneth Arrow
Howard Raiffa
John von Neumann
Herbert Simon²
Russell Ackoff
Egon Balas
Abraham Charnes
William Cooper³

NOTES
1. In his book Indiscrete Thoughts (Birkhäuser, Boston, 1997, p. 18), Gian-Carlo Rota recalls his fellow Princeton student Ralph Gomory as a "red-blooded American boyish Wasp type." In fact, Ralph Gomory's mother (née Marian Schellenberg) was from a prominent German-Jewish family that was among the founders of Beth Elohim Congregation in Brooklyn, NY. Marian Gomory's sister Rhoda Schaap was a President of the Brooklyn, NY Section of the National Council of Jewish Women.
2. Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life, by Herbert A. Simon (BasicBooks, New York, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262).
3. Jewish mother (née Rachael Rossman).

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