Obviously, I am kind-of ridiculing Stephen Hawking. As you know, thanks to Feryal Erhun, my 60th birthday was celebrated in Cambridge (UK).
In 1996 I gave a talk at the MIT Operations Research Center (ORC) on Gröbner bases for integer programming, really academic stuff, done purely for fun.
Tom Magnanti (great to see him this weekend again) was in the audience, and so was Dimitris Bertsimas, who invited me to spend my sabbatical at MIT. In August 1997, Gunjan and I drove to Boston to begin it. That year started long friendships with Dimitris, Georgia Perakis, Steve Graves, and Larry Wein, then at Sloan.
Here is a post on some of that: Having Fun with Grobner Basis and Algebraic Geometry.
Cambridge that year was also where I discovered the Kendall Square Cinema. One of my first films there was The Full Monty, I also saw Tomorrow Never Dies twice that semester.
Cambridge kept calling me back: I returned to MIT as a visitor from 2013 to 2015, when SAP acquired SmartOps, thanks to Steve and David Simchi-Levi.
Then, in the spring of 2017, thanks to Larry (and Erica Plamback) I crossed the country to spend some time as a visiting professor at the Stanford GSB.
So this weekend was a homecoming – thanks Stefanos Zenios – twice over.
It was great to catch up with folks that I had not seen in many years – Garrett Van Ryzin for example who I last recall meeting in person in 2014, Michael Harrison, Evan Porteus, Peter Glynn, Ed Kaplan, Tauhid Zaman – and many others that I do interact with often enough – David Shmoys, Shane Anderson, Jim Dai, Jon Caulkins, Baris Ata, Pinar Keskinocak, Serguei Netissene, Jan Van Mieghem, Charles Corbett, Jeremie Gallien – and many in between (Itai Ashlagi, Hamsa Bastani, Rene Caldentey, Carri Chan, Sarang Deo, Daniel Freund, Costis Maglaras, Daniela Saban, Nikos Trichakis, Gabriel Weintraub, Kuang Xu, Amy Ward). There were some who I met for the first time, notably Pengyi Shi, who was advised by Pinar (and Jim), and so is one of my (academic) granddaughters!
For fun, I decided to highlight fellow NAE members in attendance:
There were many good talks, but easily the highlight of the event was the one by Barbara Rae-Venter where she discussed how the Golden State Killer was identified and apprehended, and, how Larry — through his “algorithm that solves crimes” – has helped solve 14 — yes fourteen! — Cold Cases and Current Crimes! (Rapes and Murders).
Can I really write a post without mentioning Movies?
Congratulations to Vaishali Sinha – Director of Give it a Shot – another film that I am supporting, for winning the Best Science Documentary Award at Silbersalz 2026!
If you are in LA, please go see it on November 8th:
Los Angeles Film School, 6363 Sunset Blvd, Hollywood
Doors open, 2PM
Can I really post without mentioning Quantum?
See many of you at INFORMS tomorrow (in SF).
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