Fred Hillier: I’ve always wanted to apply math in practical ways to get positive results for organizations
Fred Hillier says that he was “born under a lucky star,” but looking back at his early days at Stanford, it’s clear he worked incredibly hard to make the most of every opportunity.
Prof. Hillier was a gifted high school student, but his family’s financial circumstances would have guaranteed his path to a local community college after graduation. Instead, he sought out and received two different college scholarships to attend Stanford. When he got to The Farm, he met his freshman advisor, Professor Gerald (Jerry) Lieberman, who would become a lifelong career mentor, academic collaborator, and friend.
Prof. Lieberman would convince Prof. Hillier to continue his education, become a professor, and join the Stanford Operations Research Program, which would later become a department under Prof. Lieberman’s leadership.
The OR department included faculty that would be hugely influential to the development of the field, including Kenneth Arrow, Harvey Wagner, Alan Manne, Arthur Veinott, and the father of linear programming, George Dantzig. Stanford Operations Research would later merge, first with the department of Engineering and Economic Systems (EES), and later with the departments of Industrial Engineering (IE) and Engineering Management (EM) to become Stanford Management Science & Engineering (MS&E).
Profs. Hillier and Lieberman published the preeminent introductory textbook for operations research for five editions, and Prof. Hillier would continue their work through many more editions. This book, which has been translated into more than 15 languages, has educated more than a million students globally.
For his many contributions to the field, Prof. Hillier will be inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Operations Research at the IFORS conference in July 2023.
Tell me about your path to Stanford.
I was supposed to go elsewhere for college. My dad was the dean of the faculty at Grays Harbor College, which is a community college where I grew up in Aberdeen, Washington. My two older brothers had started off there. It would have been a good college and an opportunity to join my dad, take courses from him, be on his debate squad, and so forth. I would start off there and then transfer to the University of Washington. My family was not affluent. It would be less expensive, and it was all very promising.
But then, my high school chemistry teacher happened to mention to the class that a particularly generous scholarship was being offered by Stanford. I was immediately interested. So I applied, and I got a really good scholarship that covered full tuition and a third of my room and board. That of course still left two-thirds of my room and board, and that was going to be pretty expensive. I was going to turn it down, but then our pastor mentioned that the American Baptist Foundation was giving college scholarships too. Somebody came down from Seattle and interviewed me, and they offered me a scholarship to cover another good fraction of the room and board. And so with the two scholarships together, I went to Stanford in 1954.
How did you develop an interest in operations research?
The biggest influence on my educational path at Stanford and my overall career in operations research was my undergraduate freshman advisor. Out of all of the Stanford faculty members who could have been assigned to me, I got a new assistant professor named Gerald Lieberman. He took me under his wing.
Jerry started telling me about this exciting new field called operations research. To introduce this field at Stanford, he was developing a new course called Introduction to Operations Research. I had planned to major in industrial engineering, and this course would be an industrial engineering course. I’ve always been a numbers person, and I’ve always wanted to apply math in ways that would get practical results—to have a positive impact on a business or organization. When I took Jerry’s new course at the beginning of my junior year, I knew that this new field would be perfect for me.
Jerry had me stick with him as an advisee. He started talking about what I should do after graduation. My plan had been to get a bachelor's degree, and maybe if my grades were good enough, stick around for another year and get a master’s in industrial engineering.
Jerry told me that I needed to set my goals higher and grab the opportunity to get a PhD while specializing in operations research. It sounded exciting, and I gradually came to accept that this was something I was capable of doing. He became my graduate advisor and later my dissertation advisor.
Jerry also arranged within the department that as a graduate student, I would teach a couple of courses, one of which was Introduction to Operations Research. This was the same course I had taken from Jerry in my junior year. I was a little nervous because there was a faculty member auditing the course. But I loved the opportunity to dig deeper into the various areas of operations research, and I made a special effort to develop this course as best I could.
My lecture notes from the course would eventually become the beginning point for our first edition of Introduction to Operations Research, the first comprehensive textbook in this area.
Tell me about the early days of Stanford Operations Research and how you ended up there.
Naturally, it was Jerry who convinced me to join the faculty, even though it was frowned upon to immediately join the faculty at the same school where you had just done both your undergraduate and graduate work. At this point, there were other interesting operations research programs beyond Stanford, and I interviewed and received offers from various universities. At the end of an interviewing trip, I called my wife to say that I had decided to accept a position at Carnegie Mellon.
But on the way back home to Stanford, I got snowed in at the airport in New York. Once again, I must have lived under a lucky star. Jerry Lieberman was on sabbatical leave at Columbia. I called him, and he invited me to come to Queens to stay at his family’s apartment until the airport opened up.
Over the next three days while the airport was snowed in, Jerry kept telling me that I should stay at Stanford because this program was going to be special. He convinced me, and I joined the faculty in the Department of Industrial Engineering in September 1961. The next year, I also became part of the new Interdepartmental Program in Operations Research. Five years later, we became the Department of Operations Research, a small but high-powered department. George Dantzig, probably the most important pioneer in operations research, joined the department, and we started to attract the top students. Jerry was right. It was a special place and opportunity.
How did the development of the textbooks feature so prominently in your career?
Back when I was developing the Introduction to Operations Research course as a graduate student, I learned the ins and outs of all the major operations research techniques. Jerry then came to me and said that the field needed an introduction to operations research textbook, and he invited me to be his co-author on such a book. It was a wonderful opportunity.
Over the summer of 1963, I spent long hours making very good progress on what would become the first edition. Along with Jerry, I kept working on it more gradually during the course of my regular duties for the next three years, and we both tried it out with students.
It was published in 1967, and it was a huge success. The field was waiting for this path-breaking textbook. Then things really took off as the years went by. In addition to dominating the domestic market, the book went worldwide with more than 15 translations.
As more years passed, a new opportunity arose. Our textbook was primarily aimed at STEM students, so it used quite a bit of mathematics. However, business schools had started offering a course, typically called Introduction to Management Science, that introduced operations research at an elementary level with a minimum of mathematics. Our publisher felt that we could adapt our original textbook using spreadsheets, and we finally agreed to do it.
Very sadly, tragedy intervened. Jerry got the terrible news in 1993 that he had developed ALS. We kept working together a little longer, but it soon became clear that he couldn’t continue, and my beloved mentor and friend eventually died in 1999.
During the mid-1990s, I was facing a real dilemma about how to proceed without Jerry. I owed so much to him, so I wanted to keep our work going to honor him. Also, our textbook was so important to the field that I felt an obligation to keep developing new editions. But how was I going to write this new book, and still keep up with new editions of the OR textbook by myself? I decided that the only way I could accomplish this would be to take an early retirement from my faculty responsibilities, become a professor emeritus, and focus on the books full-time. I made this big move in 1996.
I did manage to complete the 6th edition of Introduction to Operations Research in 1995. Then, I focused on developing the manuscript for the business school version of the book but knew that I could use a co-author to help develop the spreadsheets. My son Mark [Mark Hillier, MS&E MS ’91 and Ph.D. ‘94] had gotten a faculty position at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, was in the field and an outstanding teacher, and was very much into spreadsheets. Although he was focused on getting tenure at the time, he signed on as a 10% co-author for the first edition, which was published in 1999. As time went on, he did a lot more and became a 50/50 co-author. It’s been wonderful working with him!
How have things changed for the field of operations research during your career?
The field has continually evolved, but this has really been noticeable in the last couple of decades or so. Before then, operations research was a hot topic, but in the early 2000s, people started talking about and publishing books about analytics and related topics such as data science, data analytics, machine learning, and AI.
Substantial material on analytics, including a complete chapter on the complementary roles of operations research and analytics, has been added to both of my textbooks. In fact, the 7th edition of the business school textbook carries this theme throughout the book. We’ve changed the title to Introduction to Management Science and Business Analytics. The 12th edition of Introduction to Operations Research (to be published in early 2024) still focuses mostly on operations research but with substantial discussion of the complementary role of analytics.
Another change in operations research is that its applications have been spreading well beyond business. For example, one of the most important areas of application has been in healthcare —determining your optimal healthcare policy by using standard models and algorithms of operations research. Linear programming can be used to either maximize profit for business or, for instance, to maximize the damage to a cancerous tumor when using radiation therapy.
Any other observations?
I had the privilege of leading an MS&E fundraising campaign in 2005 to establish the Dantzig-Lieberman Operations Research Fellowships in the department. The response was overwhelming. This endowment fund has awarded 29 fellowships since it started, which is a fitting tribute to the eminent George Dantzig and to Jerry Lieberman, who was both an academic giant and a real prince of a man.
I just completed the manuscript for the 12th edition of Introduction to Operations Research, which will be out in early 2024. However, there is always considerable post-manuscript work to be done. After that, I’m planning to develop the 8th edition of the business school textbook with my son Mark.
I’m also looking forward to going to Santiago, Chile in July for my induction into the International Hall of Fame for Operations Research at the IFORS conference.
In spite of becoming an emeritus, I have never retired. My goal is to retire when I reach the age of 90 in a few years. I hope to enjoy the pleasures of retirement as much as I have enjoyed the satisfaction of contributing to my beloved field of operations research.
If you would like to contribute to the Dantzig-Lieberman Operations Research Fellowships to help support the next generation of scholars in the field, please contact the Office of Development.
