Well-known parent/child pairs in the field of OR

Does the apple fall not far from the tree in operations research? Who are well-known Parent/Child pairs in operations research? I can't claim this: my father was a chemist and my son, at fifteen, has not yet caught the OR bug.

• I would like to argue in favor of this question. It is of historic interest, and seems not too broad, since there are not so many OR parent/child pairs, neither is it opinion-based, since the facts can be checked. Could one of the "too broad"ers bring forward some arguments? – Marcus Ritt Jun 11 '19 at 9:57
• I also think the question is fine – Jeff Linderoth Jun 11 '19 at 12:38
• I agree; I think this question falls under the meta question Are questions about the field of OR on-topic?, for which the consensus is "yes". Moreover, it is not too broad and not opinion-based, as @MarcusRitt pointed out. – LarrySnyder610 Jun 11 '19 at 18:43
• How is this too broad? Overmoderation of this site is not and will not be a good thing. By analogy with one of my downvoted questions, perhaps the put on holders think there should be separate questions for father-son, father-daughter, mother-son, mother-daughter, father-nonbinary, mother-nonbinary, ... – Mark L. Stone Jun 12 '19 at 1:33

Another father-daughter pair is Matteo Fischetti of U. of Padova and his daughter Martina Fischetti who recently completed her Ph.D. at DTU with David Pisinger.

Are we still waiting for mother-child pairs? Hopefully soon...

• Embarassed that I didn't write that one. Since it was Mike Trick's Twitter post twitter.com/miketrick/status/1138218852817543168 that pointed me to the question. – Jeff Linderoth Jun 11 '19 at 13:55
• Also, does @Fischenders count as a child/clone/alter-ego/split-personality in the context of this question? – alerera Jun 11 '19 at 13:57
• Wait!!!! You mean Fishenders isn't a real person?!?!? – Jeff Linderoth Jun 11 '19 at 14:29

In Montreal we have Louis M Rousseau whose father Jean Marc Rousseau was also a professor until he quit academua to start his own company (GIRO).

From Chile there is Gabriel Weintraub, professor at Stanford and the son of Andres Weintraub.

From Brazil, there's Daniel Aloise, professor at PolyMtl, the son of Dario Aloise from Natal RN.

How about George Dantzig and his father Tobias Dantzig, who (according to wikipedia) also had a PhD in Mathematics.

• As far as I know, Tobias made two contributions to O.R: 1) having the kid and 2) suggesting the term "primal" as the problem for which the dual is the dual. – Mark L. Stone Jun 10 '19 at 23:34

For sure there is Bob Bixby and Ann Bixby. Ann did her Ph.D. at Northwestern with Collette Coullard. Also, a bit of a stretch, since his father was more of a mathematician, but there is also Gunnar Carlsson (Stanford Math) and Jon Carlsson, who is currently at USC.

• Based on my topological data analysis, I group the Carlssons together as O.R. – Mark L. Stone Jun 12 '19 at 10:16

John D.C. Little, of $$L = \lambda W$$ fame : father

John N. "Jack" Little https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Little and https://www.mathworks.com/company/aboutus/founders/jacklittle.html, President and co-founder of The Mathworks (MATLAB): son

Jack received degrees (S.B. from M.I.T.) in Electrical Engineering. Given that when I was accepted into the M.I.T. O.R. Ph.D. program, I was assigned to the Electrical Engineering (course 6) department, and in light of Jack's role in the development of MATLAB, which is heavily used in O.R., being second only to Cleve Moler, I think we can consider Jack to be close enough to O.R. for government work.

Frederick Hillier and Mark Hillier, known for their OR textbook.

• Ann, who is Fred's wife/Mark's mother, has BS and MS in Statistics, so that could also count as O.R. So this is sort of a parent/child trio. – Mark L. Stone Jul 21 '19 at 12:18

There are Robert Tibshirani, the father of the LASSO, and his son Ryan Tibshirani. Even though they mainly work in statistics they also have made some valuable contributions to the OR-community such as the LASSO, several contributions in Machine Learning or this comparison of regression methods.

Only few of you may know Erik Demaine who is not only a computer science prodigy and artist, but so is his father, Martin. They publish together.

Raffaele Cerulli from U. Salerno and his daughter Martina Cerulli — PhD student in Paris with Leo Liberti and Claudia D’Ambrosio.

I learned of another one recently. Again depending on how broad your definition of "OR" is. There is Jim Orlin from MIT and his son Ben Orlin, of Math With Bad Drawings fame. (https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/)

François Louveaux (mostly known for the book on stochastic programming he coauthored with John Birge) and Quentin Louveaux, both of them in Belgium (UNamur and ULiège, respectively).

ORMS Today published a story on this recently - "All in the family tree: INFORMS rich with O.R. legacies" - including Salah and Wedad Elmaghraby.

• Maybe the article was inspired by this thread? – Mark L. Stone Feb 10 at 12:54