Beale Memorial Lecture

Nigel Cummings

This year’s Beale Lecture was held online on 16 February 2023. As is the tradition, the actual Beale Lecture was preceded by a presentation given by a winner of the annual Doctoral Award which, in this case, was Jake Clarkson and is covered elsewhere within this issue. The Beale Medal is awarded to someone who has made a significant contribution to OR over a period of many years. This year that person is Prof Robert Dyson, who spoke about his seven-decade career in OR.

Prof. Dyson began his talk by saying how pleased he was to be speaking as a Beale lecturer, because he had known Martin Beale who was, of course, one of the leading mathematical programmers in the world. Martin was also a fellow of the Royal Society, something very few OR people have achieved. (Lord Patrick Blackett, one of the founding fathers of OR was President of the Royal Society from 1965 – 1970 but that was almost certainly due to his work in atomic physics (for which he won a Nobel Prize) rather than for any contribution to OR.)

Robert reminded us that Operational Research came to prominence in WWII although the term had been coined as early as 1934 to differentiate it from Operation Analysis. Churchill, like so many of our political leaders, was not noted for his mathematical skills but he had the foresight to recognise that such skills might just be what we needed to help us win the war. The toolkit, at that time, was little more than simple statistical analysis supported by hand-drawn graphs using experimentation and inductive and deductive reasoning, often using lateral thinking long before Edward de Bono coined the term.

Prof Dyson then spoke of his earliest career experience in OR, of his time at Liverpool University where in his final year he entered a course on Operational Research techniques. He spoke of his time from 1964 onward when he joined Pilkington Brothers glassworks (the largest private company in the UK at that time), this he said, coincided with attaining his non-residential PhD from Lancaster University and a first encounter with the professional membership debate of the OR Society.

Prof. Robert Dyson

Pilkington’s invented the process known as float glass. Molten glass is poured onto a bed of molten tin where its width and thickness are controlled. This produces large sheets of remarkably clear glass of constant thickness. These sheets then have to be cut up into smaller sheets to meet customer orders in such a way that there is minimum waste produced. This was done using linear programming – an extremely tedious process if you don’t have access to a computer. He left Pilkington’s in 1970 as a senior systems technologist.

By the 70s he had “encountered” stochastic programming and soft OR which recurred throughout the decades of his career, and he started research into strategy support. The latter continued in the 80s and beyond until his work on data envelopment analysis (DEA) began. He also spoke of some work which he had done which required his stochastic programming experience to develop an oil refinery model which was used for medium-term and capacity planning.

Robert reminded us that Operational Research came to prominence in WWII although the term had been coined as early as 1934 to differentiate it from Operation Analysis.

His career moved on when he started work at Warwick University and joined the University Warwick School of Industrial and Business Studies (SIBS) as an academic, in the 1970’s first as a lecturer, then latterly becoming Chairman of SIBS 1978-81 and Dean 1998-2000, by which time SIBS had become WBS – Warwick Business School. At Warwick he helped form a strong DEA team, it was from here that he led the development of the OR Society’s fellowship scheme.

In the 2000s an OR group met regularly at Warwick, and these meetings lead to a book on strategy support, and European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR) editing began. Then, in the 2010s editing continued and work began on the contribution of the founders of OR to soft OR and practice. Editing wound down in the 2020s and culminated when the founder’s paper was published in the Journal of Operational Research (JORs).

Robert mentioned his involvement in strategy support and his role as Pro Vice-Chancellor at Warwick, a position that carried much responsibility and weight and during which time he became involved as a facilitator in a steering group which led to a SWOT analysis for Warwick which contributed to ideas for new strategies and opportunities for the university, ideas which have been implemented and are still in use today.

Prof Dyson, a fellow of the OR Society was Chair of the Committee of the Professors of Operational Research (Copior) (1995-7), President of the OR Society (1998 and 99) and elected a Companion of Operational Research in 2007. He has published extensively in the fields of cutting and packing, stochastic programming, financial modelling, strategy support, DEA and performance management.

(Some additional material has been gleaned from Robert’s “Memoirs” produced by the WBS for his Festschrift in 2016 and, dare I say it, Wikipedia, Ed). You can see and hear Prof Dyson’s Beale presentation by accessing the ORS YouTube channel and searching for the ‘Beale Lecture 2023’

Watch the Beale Lecture on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_apgjrvBAE