Paul Rubin

There is a new Operations Research Discord server at discord.gg/RcUfeV2F. The old OR Discord server is still up, but it no longer has an owner and has been targeted by spam bots, so we are encouraging people in the #operations-research community to switch to the new server.

My presentation philosophy There are many things about preparing and presenting slides that I keep repeating to students, so I figured that I should put them down in writing. I do think that they help a lot. (And if I am doi…

Thiago Serra posted on his blog what I think are some useful tips on doing presentations. thiagoserra.com/2026/03/03/m...

Question for #orms people: do you know any problem-specific cutting planes that are not too hard to explain and separate and would improve performance compared to a baseline MIP solver (e.g. SCIP, Gurobi)? Asking because its more fun for students if they implement something and it helps performance

Now I'm a believer.

I'll confess my exposure to it is limited to (a) asking it to do a coding task for me and then seeing if the answer is the least bit helpful and (b) Google's Gemini-generated summary of my search. Accuracy is an issue; critical thinking less so.

Culture eats AI strategy for breakfast: why professors should focus on culture instead of consequences when confronting generative AI in the classroom The rise of generative AI (GenAI) has been swift, leaving many of us in higher education scrambling to adapt. We have focused on creating new policies and redesigning assignments, but it can feel l…

For my faculty friends trying to sort out how to cope with AI use by students, I think this post by @lauraalbertphd.bsky.social is dead on. punkrockor.com/2025/10/09/c...

It was an honor and a pleasure to chair the 2025 Mixed Integer Programming Workshop from June 2 to 6 in Minneapolis, MN. For everyone that missed it, we missed you too but you may catch up on the talk/poster details and competition winners via mixedinteger.org/2025 and the #mip2025 workshop program.

The Mathematics Jobs Wiki is open for the 2025–2026 season.
notable.math.ucdavis.edu/wiki/Mathema...
#MathSky

Teddy knew what he was talking about.

Optimization Expertise Hub

An interesting new website just launched for folks in the optimization community.

optimization4all.com

This quote seems to harken some public figure, but for the life of me I can't think of who it might be....

(h/t to 7Takeaways [.com]. Worth a free subscription.)

Meet the man who made six figures selling anti-Elon Musk Tesla stickers Matthew Hiller started making anti-Elon Musk stickers for Teslas after Musk's X takeover. He's made six figures selling them.

Matthew Hiller started making anti-Elon Musk stickers for Teslas after Musk's X takeover. He's made six figures selling them.

Pete Hegseth: ‘There Are No State Secrets In A Healthy Relationship’ WASHINGTON—Staunchly defending his decision to share sensitive military data in messages to his wife, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Monday, “There are no state secrets in a healthy rel...

Pete Hegseth: ‘There Are No State Secrets In A Healthy Relationship’

Rubio Says U.S. to ‘Move On’ From Ukraine Peace Efforts if No Progress Soon “If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as he departed meetings in Paris.

During the campaign, Trump said it would be so easy to end the war in Ukraine he could do it in 24 hours and in fact would do it before being inaugurated. Three months after his inauguration, his chief diplomat now says it is so hard he may stop trying. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/w...

My dad's mom died when I was 15ish. I didn't use my mom's mother as an excuse; instead, I sat with her as she died several years after I graduated college. But I do remember "my grandmother died" being used by several other students as an excuse during my college years. Some 'died' several times!

Summer 2025 schools on algorithms, machine learning, mathematics, optimization, and other relevant topics in operations research After a 5-year hiatus and finding out that this was helpful to many people, I am reviving the list of schools. The purpose of organizing this is to help graduate students find a summer school to ga…

Thiago Serra has posted a list of summer schools on OR-related topics. thiagoserra.com/2025/02/04/s...

Celebrating Two Amazing Female Operations Researchers, Both 93 Years Old, for Their Contributions to Algorithms Since this blogpost was published, sadly, Professor Ailsa Land passed away on May 16, 2021. Please refer to this obituary posted on the Lond...

Today, the daughters of Dr. Marguerite Frank wrote me that she passed away on Dec. 11 at the age of 97. I had written a post about her & Ailsa Land when they turned 93: annanagurney.blogspot.com/2021/03/cele... No obituary yet. Marguerite was a friend. I helped with a paper award in her honor. #orms

Santa may be late this year.

Santa may be late this year.

Emily Tucker posted a helpful "starter pack" at bsky.app/starter-pack....

New starter pack if you're looking for the #orms community on here: go.bsky.app/SvBND16

Also if you have recommendations of people to add, feel free to send them my way.

Thanks for doing this!

Erwin Kalvelagen posted slides for a talk he gave about large scale #optimization models. It contains some interesting stuff. yetanothermathprogrammingconsultant.blogspot.com/2024/07/prac...

Random thought for the day: a completely logical AI program would probably crash trying to fill out a US federal tax return; but an LLM prone to hallucination would have no trouble with it.

Don Knuth’s MIP, 64 years later In 1960, the famed computer scientist Don Knuth wrote a technical paper in which he considered an integer programming model for minimizing memory access latency of an IBM 650. I've included a screensh...

Interesting post by Nate Brixius about a mixed integer programming model ahead of its time. nathanbrixius.wordpress.com/2024/04/13/d...