In Memorium of Dr. Paul Jensen

I received discouraging news last week that we lost a colleague in the Operations Research and INFORMS community.  Dr. Paul Jensen passed away peacefully on April 4, 2011.  Dr. Jensen served a number of years at the Univ. of Texas in Austin as a great contributor to the Operations Research community and researcher.  As recently as 2007 Dr. Jensen was awarded the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of ORMS Practice.

I unfortunately did not know Dr. Jensen personally.  I was first introduced to his ORMM website through my graduate courses at SMU.  The ORMM website is a great resource to help educate the principles of Operations Research methods.  I was also able to use some of his Excel modeling add-ons in practice to demonstrate optimization problems.

Dr. James Cochran is going to hold a special session in memorium of Dr. Jensen.  This message from Dr. Cochran was sent on Dr. Jensen's ORMM mailing list.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Paul was a good friend and colleague.  I know each of us will miss him (as will many other friends throughout the OR community) and each of us is very sorry for the loss suffered by Margaret and the rest of Paul's family.

I will chair a special INFORM-ED sponsored session in Paul's memory at the 2011 INFORMS Conference in Charlotte (November 13-16).  Several of Paul's many friends will speak on his contributions to operations research education and share personal stories and remembrances about Paul.  Margaret and Paul's children will be invited to attend, and I hope each of you will also be able to attend (I'll try to reserve some time at the end of the session during which members of the audience will have an opportunity to share their thoughts).

INFORMS Transactions on Education (the online journal for which I am Editor in Chief) will also publish a special issue devoted to Paul's influence on OR education.  Dave Morton has kindly agreed to edit this special issue, so I am certain it will be a fine tribute to Paul.

Sincerely,

Jim