He wrote "Model Thinking for Everyday Life," published by INFORMS, aiming to encourage readers to learn how to think differently and become more effective in making decisions.
LEXINGTON, MA, February 23, 2024 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Richard "Dick" Larson has been included in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Leveraging more than four decades of excellence in operations research ("OR"), Dr. Larson has earned distinction as a chaired professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1969 until attaining post tenure status in 2019, he focused his efforts on undertaking OR research and applying it in practice, often jointly with his doctoral students, with emphasis on urban applications. He is best known for his development of the Hypercube Queueing Model, which stands out for its original rigorous mathematical foundation for an important class of spatially distributed queueing systems: emergency response systems (police, fire and emergency medical). He optimized the algorithm to ensure its efficiency, devising and programming a clever compression technique to enable relatively quick processing for a problem that grows exponentially with the number of responders. To facilitate implementation of his work in practice, he co-founded an off-campus applied research and consulting firm, called – over the years - by various names including ENFORTH Corporation and Q.E.D. https://qed.online
Jointly with MIT Prof. Dan Frey and with his (now deceased) wife (Mary Elizabeth Murray), Dr. Larson co-founded the MIT BLOSSOMS program https://blossoms.mit.edu. (BLOSSOMS = Blended Learning Open Source Science Or Math Studies) The set of BLOSSOMS video lessons is one of the first (perhaps THE first) widely distributed science and math-oriented Open Source Learning repositories ever created. All of these open-source educational videos are now available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR_HiQVSl8_KZ9ItuleTnpQ/featured
Outside of his primary career efforts, Dr. Larson served as the president of both the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He is also the author of "Urban Police Patrol Analysis" (1972), which earned him the Lanchester Prize for Best Publication in Operations Research, and he co-authored with Professor Amedeo Odoni the textbook "Urban Operations Research" (with 1,345 citations). Most recently (2023), he wrote "Model Thinking for Everyday Life," published by INFORMS, aiming to encourage readers to learn how to think differently and become more effective in making decisions.
To prepare for his professional journey, Dr. Larson earned a Doctor of Philosophy in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. Within the coming years, he intends to secure wide distribution of his book and potentially expand its reach beyond its present platform on Amazon. He will also continue his involvement as a proud member of the National Academy of Engineering, a highly respected organization.
Dr. Larson is the proud father to three adult children -- Erik, Evan and Ingrid – and Grand-Dad to four young grandchildren.
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Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Marquis celebrates its 125th anniversary in 2023, and Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis® publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
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