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The Contributions of Biologists to Operational Analysis (Operations Research) and of Operational Analysis to Biology

Marc Mangel

I will begin with a definition of operational analysis/operations research, after which I situate it in the problem solving plane t and in Donald Stokes’s notion of use-inspired basic research in Pasteur’s Quadrant.  I then turn to the history of the field, beginning in the United Kingdom with the group lead by Patrick Blackett  and then turning to Phil Morse’s development of the Anti Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG), which was the precursor to the Operations Evaluation Group.  I will briefly discuss the contributions of biologists Solly Zuckerman and C.H. Waddington (UK) and Sheldon Reed, Gerald Pomerat, and Kenneth Thimann (US) during and after the war.  I close this part of the talk with the contributions biologists have to offer.

I will then turn to contributions that operations analysis has made to biology, in which operations analysis is a simile (cooperative hunting of shipping vessels by submarines is like the cooperative search for schools of fish by fishing vessels), a metaphor (that how we think about passive localization can help guide trapping during pest infestations), and a muse (in which the fundamental ideas of search for a moving target suggest ways of characterizing how evolution by natural selection acts on behavior of organisms).  In each case of simile, metaphor, or muse the biology and analysis will be introduced as needed, so that there is no specific background required.