William W. Cooper

William Wager Cooper (born July 23, 1914 in Birmingham , Alabama ; † June 20, 2012 ) was an American business economist who dealt with operations research and is considered one of the pioneers here, especially in its application in business administration.

Life

Cooper grew up in Chicago and had to leave high school due to the Great Depression to support his family in various odd jobs, including boxing. He studied business administration at the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in 1938. He was then an accountant at the Tennessee Valley Authority under his mentor Eric Kohler (1892-1976), professor at Northwestern University. Kohler had urged him to start a university course and he switched from physical chemistry to business administration after he was able to score in a patent litigation as Kohler's assistant by discovering a mathematical error in the patent documents. In 1940 he continued his studies at theColumbia University , interrupted by World War II when he worked in the statistics department of the US Bureau of Budget. From 1944 to 1946 he taught at the University of Chicago and from 1946 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the School of Industrial Administration (the later Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University ). He worked there with Abraham Charnes and Herbert A. Simon and became a professor. He was also from 1949 to 1950 assistant to Eric Kohler, the controller of the Marshall Plan was. In 1969 he became dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon (now Heinz College). In 1975 he became Dickson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University and in 1980 Foster Parker Professor of Management, Finance and Accounting at the University of Texas at Austin . In 1993 he retired, but remained active in research.

In 1953 he was founding president of The Institute of Management Science (TIMS, since 1995 merged with the Operations Research Society of America to form the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science ). In 1981 he was the founding editor of Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory . In 1986 he was President of the Accounting Researchers International Association.

In the 1950s he dealt with the transportation problem .

In 2006 he and Abraham Charnes received the INFORMS Impact Prize for their work on data envelope analysis (the CCR model here is named after Cooper, Charnes and Edwardo L. Rhodes). In 1982 he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize with Charmes and Richard Duffin . He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the Econometric Society, and the Operations Research Society of America. In 1976 he received an honorary degree from Harvard and he has been awarded three honorary degrees (Carnegie Mellon, University of Alicante, The Ohio State University).

Fonts

• with A. Charnes, A. Henderson: An introduction to linear programming, Wiley 1953 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Japanese)
  • by him and Henderson in Part 1: An economic introduction to linear programming
• with Charnes: Management models and industrial applications of linear programming, 2 volumes, Wiley 1961
• Editor: Data envelopment analysis: theory, methodology, and application, Kluwer 1994
• with Charnes, RJ Niehaus: Studies in manpower planning, Washington DC, Office of Civilian Manpower Management, Dept. of the Navy, 1972
• Editor with Charnes, RJ Niehaus: Management science approaches to manpower planning and organization design, North Holland 1978
• Editor with AB Whinston: New Directions in Computational Economics, Kluwer 1994
• with Lawrence M. Seiford, Kaoru Tone: Introduction to data envelopment analysis and its uses: with DEA-solver software and references, Springer Verlag 2006

Web links

• Obituary at the University of Texas