Pull a stack of credit card offers out of your mailbox. Check into a hotel. Play the market. Buy some lumber. Join the army.
Operations research has a hand in all of it, behind the scenes.
And in an economy where speed and efficiency are survival skills, operations research is back in vogue. There's still not even a consensus on what the discipline should be called. At some universities, it's industrial engineering, at others, management science. At Cornell, it's known as the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, housed in the ultra-modern Rhodes Hall on the edge of the Engineering Quad. C aggiano recently returned to the Hill to teach after a two-year stint with PeopleSoft, where she worked with corporate customers who had hired the firm to create software for their production systems.