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.