Thomas L. Magnanti

INTERVIEWER: Today's April 6, 2010. As part of MIT's sesquicentennial Infinite History project, we are talking with professor Thomas Magnanti.

Tom is one of 14 Institute Professors at MIT and former dean of MIT's School of Engineering. He has devoted much of his professional career to education that combines engineering and management. And to teaching and research, and applied and theoretical aspects of large scale optimization. As dean, Tom focused on educational innovation, industrial and international partnerships, technology-based entrepreneurship, and diversity in innovation in emerging domains such as bioengineering, tiny technologies, information engineering, and engineering systems.

Professor Magnanti has led several centers and programs at MIT, including as the founding co-director, MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing, and System Design and Management Programs, and as founding director, the Singapore- MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

He has served as president of three major professional societies, and editor of operations research. He also headed one-third of the Sloan School of Management for several years. Professor Magnanti has received numerous educational and research awards and honorary degrees and has served on a number of corporate and university boards. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Syracuse University, and master's degrees in statistics and mathematics, as well as a PhD in operations research all from Stanford University.

Professor Magnanti is currently serving as president of the Singapore University of Technology and Design, a role he assumed in October of 2009.

Tom, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today.

MAGNANTI: My pleasure, Larry.

INTERVIEWER: So, Tom, can you please start by telling us a bit about where you grew up?

MAGNANTI: I grew up in upstate New York, Syracuse, New York in sort of a middle class neighborhood, middle class family. Spent much of my youth enjoying sports, playing baseball. I used to play baseball from about 8:00 in the morning -- I'd get up, I'd be the only kid in my neighborhood up and I'd just throw the ball up in the air and catch it. I would play through dinner. Come home, have a couple sandwiches, collapse and start the day over again. That was my youth -- my misguided youth, as they say.

INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us a little bit about your family and any significant events or influences that stand out from your childhood?

MAGNANTI: Well, probably the most significant influence was my father was an applied mathematician. He had these math books that I would look at when I was a kid. He would also pose math problems for me. So we'd be driving in the car, whatever, and he'd pose math problems. I guess I took a liking to them and really enjoyed them. I actually was talking to my wife last night and she asked me what I wanted to be when I was 20. I said I've always wanted to be a professor, even at age 20. She said no, you couldn't possibly. I said yeah, that's what I wanted to be. I think it was from reading those books and that interaction with my father.

INTERVIEWER: That's great.

MAGNANTI: He was a math major at Syracuse University and then went to University of Minnesota where he was a graduate student. Then unfortunately, his mother died and we all swiftly moved back to Syracuse, so he never actually finished his graduate studies.

INTERVIEWER: Did he teach?

MAGNANTI: He did a little bit of teaching, but most of his time he worked for a company called Solvay Process, later became part of the Allied Chemical Corporation. He did mostly the cost estimation type of activities. There's something called critical path method, and he brought that critical path method to bear on the company. But he had a photographic memory. He just remembered numbers all the time. He also, after World War II, when he came back after World War II, made his living for six months playing gin rummy. I think it's reputed that I took my first steps in the back room of a pool hall where people were gambling. He learned to play gin rummy from someone in the Air Force who I think was the Florida State champ. By the end of his time in the Air Force he could beat the fellow regularly. Finally after six months, no one in Syracuse, New York would play him anymore because he was winning all the time, so he had to get a real job.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that that came from a combination of his photographic memory and his mathematical skills?

MAGNANTI: Yeah, exactly. I think he brought the two together, yeah. He would say that he almost never came across a gin rummy hand that he hadn't seen in some ways before.

INTERVIEWER: He could have taken that to Las Vegas.

MAGNANTI: Once, when I was an undergraduate student at Syracuse University, I had started playing gin rummy and bridge for money and things and I was doing pretty well. So I thought I'll challenge the old man, right. So I came back home and said I'm ready for the challenge. Of course, he whipped me, right, it wasn't even close.

INTERVIEWER: So, as a young boy did you have any challenges balancing this love of sports and the love of mathematics and what it took--?

MAGNANTI: No, nothing particularly. I was fortunate that studies came easy to me. So I can't say I spent all that much time on my studies, spent most of it on sports, actually.

INTERVIEWER: Was there an ah-ha moment when you realized you had a special aptitude in the sciences?

MAGNANTI: No. No, Ah-ha moment. I think I had always had been pretty good at math type of thing. I did have an English teacher who used to berate me because I would spend all my time on my math stuff and she didn't think I was taking English seriously enough.

I had some very good teachers, and I had one particularly good chemistry teacher in high school, and I would say that he had some influence on me in terms of just people who were really great in the classroom teaching.

INTERVIEWER: So, was that when you first developed or got interested in science and engineering?

MAGNANTI: No, I think it actually came from looking in my father's books and just sort of reading them and sort of getting intrigued by the puzzles that he would pose to me. Then I decided to go to an undergraduate school in chemical engineering. It was a very small department, only 12 of us.

INTERVIEWER: How did you decide on chemical engineering?

MAGNANTI: Well, my father, again, worked for a chemical company, so all of his friends chemies. He was an applied mathematician, all his friends were chemies. I said what do I know, I was a chem kid, so I'll go study chemical engineering. I was in a very small department, only 12 of us graduated that year in our department. I think I had maybe the number three grade point average from the university, which was pretty unheard of for someone in engineering. But the number one was one of the other 12. I wasn't even the best of the 12 in the chemical engineering graduating class.

INTERVIEWER: So when was it apparent to you that you were going to be going to Syracuse?

MAGNANTI: Well, I actually commuted. I think it was just growing up, that was sort of the natural place to go, right. Coming from this middle class family, we didn't have lots of resources, it was the local university. My father had gone there. He graduated from Syracuse University as well. So I don't think it was much of a conscious decision. I think I may have had an offer from Cornell, but I was going to stay pretty local. I would say in those days people didn't travel quite as much as they do today, in terms of thinking about going any place in the country to school. At least from my neighborhood people didn't travel, that's for sure.

INTERVIEWER: But then your horizons broadened significantly when you ended up at Stanford for your Master's degree. Can you tell us how that came about?

MAGNANTI: I can't say that chemical engineering ever excited me all that much. I sort of liked some of math sides of it, but the chemistry part didn't send me all that much. I think I might have been a junior at Syracuse, one of my professors gave me, it was a reading course, a book to read and it was on something called linear programming, which is sort of the core area of operations research. This was great because I didn't have to do anything in a laboratory. I could just think about mathematics and use it. It seemed to be interesting problems the people were addressing. So I decided well maybe that's it for me.

So then when I applied to graduate school, I applied to one ChemE department, University of Delaware, which had a group that did quite a bit of math type stuff for ChemE. I applied to a couple of operations research departments. When the fellow at Stanford who was actually in chemical engineering who is well-known for applying these kind of methodologies in chemical engineering fields, I thought well maybe I'll go there and end up studying with him. It turns out I went there and there's a fellow named George Dantzig, who is sort of viewed as probably the greatest operations researcher ever. The father of linear programming. National Medal of Science, National Medal of Technology winner. That caliber of person. He was moving from Berkeley to Stanford. He came I think the year before I did. So I had an opportunity go and work with the very best.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know when you were going out to Stanford that you were going to be pursuing a PhD in operations research?

MAGNANTI: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, you did. So that was the plan right there --

MAGNANTI: That was the plan, yes.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me, how did you come to get two master's degrees, one in mathematics and one in statistics?

MAGNANTI: Well, unlike MIT, Stanford requires no thesis for Master's degrees. If you just took enough courses and they were related to statistics they automatically gave you a degree, a Master's degree. So, the master's degree in statistics is basically a set of courses on my way to my PhD. But I really loved mathematics. So I started taking extra math courses and decided while I'm doing this, I might as well get a degree in mathematics as well. So I just sort of built up enough course credits to get a master's in math.

When I finished, I thought well this is the best life in the world. Being a graduate student and studying and learning, getting up every day and just going to learn. So I thought well maybe I should go get a second PhD, and I was thinking actually getting one in mathematics. My wife, who had been working and helping me to support me through school, said well, maybe it's time to get a job, guy. You gotta get a job.

INTERVIEWER: But you knew from a young age you wanted to be a professor.

MAGNANTI: That's correct, yes.

INTERVIEWER: So then you pursued that plan and you earned a PhD in operations research. Then what were the next steps after that? With your wife's encouragement you went out looking for a job.

MAGNANTI: Well, I didn't go looking. There were people coming to Stanford to interview. Actually a faculty member here by the name of Jerry Shapiro who was sort of the senior OR -- he and John Little were the senior OR people at MIT. He was out there interviewing, and the Stanford faculty were kind enough to say you should really talk to this guy Magnanti. So he came and talked to me. I said, well, I'm really thinking of maybe of doing a postdoc and I really wanted to go to IBM for a postdoc. My thesis advisor, I think there was only one postdoc in this field at the time at IBM. He was trying to work the system at IBM to give me this postdoc. Then I had another fellow at University of Wisconsin who was on me for a postdoc. He would call at 11:00 p.m. every night to talk to me, right, because he's really anxious for me to come. And I really wanted to one of these postdocs.

So, I mean this is unimaginable now. So I wasn't interviewing for any jobs at all, but this fellow from MIT had come and he said come on back East and spend a couple days with this interview. So I come back and I interview and basically that night over drinks, he basically said we're going to offer you a job. Again, unheard of, you'd just never do that today.

So I went back to Stanford and I really wanted one of these postdocs, so I was talking to the head of the department at that time. And he said to me are you crazy? He says MIT is offering you a full-time position to go into faculty, and you want to go off to one of these postdocs. So I guess I thought about this for a while, and I got the job.

INTERVIEWER: I'm surprised Stanford didn't make a counter offer. Were they looking to keep you there?

MAGNANTI: No, I actually don't think Stanford was looking that year. Cornell was looking, MIT -- two or three places. As I said, I just sort of stumbled into this job.

INTERVIEWER: Now what were your impressions of -- growing up in Syracuse, was MIT on the radar screen, or what were your thoughts about it in upstate New York?

MAGNANTI: That's a good question. I don't think I had this particular strong image of MIT at the time. I knew the OR field from my studies, and MIT at that time, and still to this time, had an interdepartmental OR program had decided to try it on resources from around the Institute but had no department. I was more inclined for departments. So it's quite possible if Cornell had made me an offer, I might have gone to the Cornell department.

So I was really focused on OR I would say, not necessarily on engineering per se. Of course, when I came to MIT, I came to the Sloan school. So this is sort of an odd thing as well. My thesis at Stanford was in a very, very abstract area of mathematics, something called matroids, which was just math for math psych. Had no application. And here was a management school hiring someone. One of the faculty colleagues used to call me Mr. Matroids when I came to the faculty. Again, these days it would be very difficult I think for someone to join any business school with such a background. So, it was a very different time.

INTERVIEWER: MIT has your department head at Stanford to thank for you coming here.

MAGNANTI: In some measure, yes.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, in some measure in terms of that advice.

MAGNANTI: In terms of it was remarkably sage advice, that's for sure.

INTERVIEWER: So what were your first impressions coming to MIT -- the students, the culture, the environment?

MAGNANTI: Well, one of my first early impressions was I was here, I think my family had not arrived yet. It was about 11 o'clock on an evening night and I was walking down Mass Ave. I had just come from Stanford. First of all, I was from Syracuse, New York, a rather small city, and then gone to Stanford, the farm, which is pretty quiet at night. Here I was 11 o'clock at night with cars bustling and people walking around. I said, boy, this is a really different environment. So, it was really a different environment in that sense. It was pretty exciting. I mean I think it always is for young people.

So I go into the classroom and have a sense that everyone in there's going to be a genius, right, and here I'm going to be standing in front of all these geniuses, what am I going to do? So, MIT could be pretty inhibiting, I think, at that time. These were the days when people had slide rules, very limited computing power, so it was a very different time in that sense. But it was extraordinarily to come to the place.

INTERVIEWER: Then in terms of the culture, in terms of what you had been accustomed to at Stanford and now you're interacting with students. You didn't come here as a student, but you came here as a faculty member. What did you think in terms of whatever stereotypes you had in advance, or whatever preconceived notions you had about MIT?

MAGNANTI: What I've always said is one of the big transitions that students make is that you go to the other side of the desk. So instead of sitting in front of the professor, you're on the other side of the desk.

My first year here was very quiet. I just recall sort of sitting in my office doing my work, no one bothered me, I didn't bother anybody. But also I've always viewed MIT as a very, very friendly place, but not necessarily a very social place. I think it's gotten more social over the years. But sort of people left you alone, let you do your work. I was I think the only junior faculty member hired that year.

INTERVIEWER: You were also very young.

MAGNANTI: Yeah, I was quite young, yeah. So I just sat in my office, did my work, taught my courses, probably didn't interact with much of anybody. Then it was my second year where I started I think get a little more rhythm of interacting with the community more. In those early years, I spent a lot, a lot of time with the students, a lot of time with them, which was about as much fun as you can imagine. Of course, my first student was -- first of all, some of the students were older than I was, and many of them looked older than I was. I actually looked very young at that time. I had these early pictures of me, my hair down to my shoulders. It was this hippie coming from the West Coast to join the faculty. My first graduate student ever was Gabriel Bitran, who later became deputy dean of the Sloan school, a very prominent academic academician himself. I think he's about three or four months older than I am, a few months older than I am. So, I was very, very young looking, interacting with people that were basically the graduate students my age, many of them a little bit older. So, you have sort of bit of different interactions with folks at that point in your life.

INTERVIEWER: What was the balance like between teaching and deciding to do your research and thinking toward publishing? What was that like early on?

MAGNANTI: One is we did more teaching back then. I recall it was my second year at MIT, taught four courses, which is pretty significant by MIT standards, certainly these days. I had a lot of time for research, an awful lot of time for research. Of course, this was also a time of great personal growth. So I had a young family, I had a young son, young wife, we were living in an apartment. I think we tend to forget, at least the old cadres such as myself now, how exhilarating it can be to be a young faculty member, and how much time the young faculty people have. They have all this enormous amount of time on their hand. So I had plenty of time to do all kinds of research, plenty of time to do my courses.

INTERVIEWER: Did you like teaching?

MAGNANTI: Yeah, very much so. I loved it, just loved it. This was a reason to come to a university, to do teaching, do research, interact with students, fellow faculty.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk a little bit about your areas of expertise. Explain to me, if you would, a little bit about each. One, operations research. Can you talk a little bit about that field and what that's about?

MAGNANTI: Operations research was actually born at MIT. So, a very distinguished physicist by the name Phil Morris, Phillip Morris, viewed frequently as the father of operations research in the United States. This came out of efforts that he was doing during the war, Second World War where many physicists at the time, I think some chemists, were brought to Washington to help with the war effort. They were doing things like optimal deployment of radar, optimal deployment of other military resources. The title became operations research with the notion you were researching and operations -- operations is simply getting things done.

That field has several different branches. Much of it has tried to do planning, sort of bring analysis, mathematics, modeling to plan. So if you're a manufacturer, how do you plan for the flow of goods and materials through a manufacturing facility. If you're a telecommunication company, how do you design a telecommunication network, how do you route messages in a telecommunication network.

So, part of the field looks at underlying uncertainty, and so you've got variations in those operations. A field called queuing theory, how queue is developed and built up -- our dear friend Dick Larson is an expert in that field. So that's one branch. Another significant branch is optimization. So how do you develop approaches to better organize a distribution system, to better organize a procurement system, better organize a telecommunication system. That's what I fell in love with was this field with optimization. So it's developing mathematical tools, algorithms, methodologies, models for looking at various operations and how to improve them.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe an optimization problem or challenge that impacts our daily lives? Just an example of one.

MAGNANTI: As an example. I don't know if your car has a GPS system in it. You go in your car in your GPS system and say I want to go home. You push the button from wherever you are to go home. What does it immediately do? It immediately goes through an algorithm that computes the shortest path to get you from where you are to home. So that's an algorithm. The algorithm says given the travel times and the various streets that I might go over, what's the best path for me to take through this system. So it's actually solving an optimization problem to optimizing that. So every time you press your GPS system it's doing that.

Every time you pick up your phone and make a phone call, the system has to determine what's the best way to route the message through the telecommunication system. When you click on your internet, it's doing the same thing. Those are all optimization problems or planning problems in which you're trying to use technology for best purposes in those cases. So sometimes people say operations research isn't about creating technologies, it's creating the best way to use those technologies.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. I'm jumping ahead here with this detail, but I know that you were involved in developing systems that assisted Singapore ports. Is that a larger scale? Can you talk a little bit about the work that was done to assist with that problem?

MAGNANTI: That isn't actually work that I've done, but those types of issues are operations research issues.

So you've got all these ships coming into port. You have to take the containers off all these ships. You've got to determine what order to take the containers, where to put them, how to place them so that when you're going to remove them and move to another port, what's the best way to access them, what's the best way to move them around in the port? So you can develop procedures or methods for doing that. What's the best place to place the container? If you've got to load a container, what's the best way to load them?

A famous problem in the operations research literature is called the packing problem. So I've got a container, so think of you moving your household goods, right. You've got this limited trailer that you've rented, and you want to pack as many of your goods in as possible, so you don't have to make too many trips for this. It's an optimization problem. It's called a packing problem. So that's an example of this. So if you're just packing containers, that would be a problem in operations research.

INTERVIEWER: Now another area of expertise is management science. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MAGNANTI: Often management science is used synonymous with operations research. People view management science in various ways. But one sort of definition of management science is taking science and applying it to management. So it's applying analytic methods, mathematics, modeling, these types of things, to management. So in that sense, there's not much difference in operations research. So, operations research doesn't always apply just to management issues. It might apply to engineering issues or other issues. Then there's some folks who would say that management science is actually broader than that. That it would include information systems, not just operations research. It would include marketing.

So if you look at the Sloan school, the Sloan school's composition of management science has operations research, something called operations management, marketing, information technology, are all part of management science. Actually, when I headed up the management science group at Sloan, it also included the accounting group, so it was part of the management sciences.

INTERVIEWER: You are considered a pioneer in the field of education by your efforts to combine engineering with management. Why was this kind of change so necessary?

MAGNANTI: Well, I think historically, there was this divide between those who created the technology and those who managed the technologies. Historically, engineers and educators -- didn't talk to management educators -- and just as you find stovepiping industry you find stovepiping at universities. MIT was a little bit of an exception to that in the sense that there was more fluid boundaries between the schools. In fact, when I first came to MIT, the Sloan school was a very, very techie place. It's hard for people to really comprehend this now, but the Basic Information Technology course at the Sloan school at that time actually taught something called machine language. So this was the language for, as you well know, the underlying bit language or close to the bit language for programming computers. In my own field with operations research, it actually taught the mathematical algorithms for solving some of these planning problems.

So, it had always have been a very techie place -- of course, Sloan grew out of the engineering school here at MIT. But even then, I think historically even Sloan and engineering were quite separate at MIT. That you'd find some people that would cross the boundaries, so that early on I would say the operations research people crossed the boundaries between Sloan and engineering, and the economics faculty crossed the boundaries between Sloan and economics at MIT. So you saw these boundaries.

I think then as we try to address some important societal issues, the first one of those I was involved with, and probably today one of the most significant collaborative initiatives between Sloan and engineering and several of now management engineering schools with our Leaders for Manufacturing Program. This was born out of the crisis in the mid-'80s. In the mid-'80s, for those that remember, the US. was losing its manufacturing base. There was a sense that the Japanese had taken over manufacturing. They had adopted quality principles and just in time principles and other principles, and we were losing jobs in the United States, we were losing market share in many of our most important industries. Our balance of payments was getting out of whack. There was a general fear that the US had lost its way in terms of manufacturing.

I would say MIT to its credit, and I would credit in particular, Jerry Wilson who was the dean of engineering at that time. I think Jerry, because of his personal interest in this and his personal credential. But also I think he was being pressed by some people from the outside. And said, you know this is an important issue, the country is in some problems and troubles and you're the leading engineering school in the world, perhaps you should be doing something about this. Jerry, to his credit, stood up and said yes. We are part of the problem, that is MIT's part of the problem, engineering's part of the problem.

So he started some conversations and he actually started the conversations with Ken Bowen who at that time was a professor of material science, ceramicist at MIT. It became clear as they started talking to people that this required just not an engineering technology solution but also management solution to come to grips with it. So he started some conversations with the Sloan school in terms of this. I, at that time, was heading up about a third of the Sloan school, the so-called management science area. There was some false starts at this. They'd made a proposal to IBM and IBM chose some universities and not MIT. It was a National Science Foundation Center of Excellence, centers of engineering excellence, and we didn't win one of those. These conversations were going on and it seemed to me that this was pretty important to MIT, pretty important to the Sloan school. I think they were looking for a contact at Sloan.

So I said well, I've been doing this management science thing for a while now, why don't I joined them in this effort, so I joined them. I'd been interacting a fair amount with engineering already through the operations research center. But that started I think a more deep collaboration between the two schools. That became a bit of a model for several other universities. So several universities adapted that model and it became I think a way of bringing together the best of management education, research and thinking with engineering education and research thinking.

INTERVIEWER: You were co-founder of Leaders for Manufacturing.

MAGNANTI: That's correct. Ken Bowen and I were the co-directors as it began, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Then you also co-founded this System Design and Management Program?

MAGNANTI: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Did that grow out of this work? How were they connected?

MAGNANTI: No. They're clearly related. So we had developed the Leaders for Manufacturing Program and it was a remarkably exciting time. We had leaders from industry working with us. Many of the leading manufacturers in the country. So their VPs for manufacturing, sometimes engineering were working with us. Some of the second level executives were working with us. We had developed the program and we've gotten into the fourth or fifth year for the program. It struck me that it was moving along quite well. I was actually very proud of it. I'm very proud of what we've done. My own sense is every few years it's good to do something different. So I said well, it's probably best -- and I think it's also best that these programs don't become identified with a single person. I think they should become institutionalized rather than personalized. So I said it's probably best that I move on and do something else and have someone else take the reins for this program.

So, when I stepped aside there had been some interest in developing something in the systems area. I'm trying to recall now. Joe Moses was very interested in this. Somehow, I don't think I can quite recall, but somehow I'd gotten involved in this -- sort of a next thing to do. Started conversations again across the schools, and at least the initial notion was this was going to do for engineering what LFM had done for manufacturing -- of bringing engineering management, and engineering-engineering closer together in terms of the engineering, product development side of the house rather than the manufacturing side of the house.

In some sense, LFM had been thought of as big on manufacturing. It wasn't just the manufacturing shop floor, it was the whole enterprise. So we started to work on that. I was working at that point with a handful of faculty. I think Dick Schmalensee was involved, Ed Roberts was involved, Earll Murman was sort of the closest contact. I got held up one day, the Amsterdam Airport, there was a plane delay or something and I got held up for seven or eight hours there. So I recall at that time writing the original proposal for the SDM Program. This was the proposal for the System Design and Management Program, which seemed to resonate with people. Then at that time Earll Murman suggested that there's this young faculty member in our department who you might want to get involved with this, and this Ed Crowley.

So, Ed and I met and developed a relationship, and so we started as pioneering or founding co-directors of that program, the SDM Program.

INTERVIEWER: That program is still thriving.

MAGNANTI: Yes, still thriving, yes.

INTERVIEWER: In conceptualizing SDM you did a lot of field research. Can you talk about the reason for that and the ultimate value of that research?

MAGNANTI: First of all, we wanted this to meet industrial needs and to be something that was going to be valued by industry. Just like LFM we wanted to engage industry in helping to frame the curriculum from the problem with it. So we went to some of our colleges and industries and said what should we be teaching? They, to their credit, said wrong question. The question you should be asking us is what's the core knowledge that you need for these programs. Then you're the educators, you'll develop a curriculum around that core knowledge.

So we then decided to go out and to spend a fair amount of time talking to people from industry. We actually did use some tools of design -- Ed Crowley really did this. So something called house of quality and some other tools. So, Ed tried to take those tools and use them as we were getting this information from industry. We used those tools and methodology to then develop the core knowledge we wanted and then built upon that curriculum that we developed.

Those were both pretty heady programs to start. LFM we had decided, actually Jerry Wilson had decided, that we weren't going to start the program unless we got sufficient funding from industry. If we're going to do this we had to do this well. We had been going around and around with several companies -- we had some that had committed -- but hadn't yet gotten the full funding for this. It was April in the year that we started, we finally got the funding, and now we had to decide whether we were going to wait a following year, because we were starting in July, or we would start that July. We decided to go ahead and start that July. So this, mind you, without the curriculum in place, without all the faculty quite in place. So we actually took people who had already applied to either engineering or Sloan school. We said we got a deal for you. You can come to this brand new program that has no curriculum, had no department status, it's this interdisciplinary program, but you'll get a full fellowship, you get full tuition, you can a stipend from us.

INTERVIEWER: That's a great way of jump-starting.

MAGNANTI: It was a great way. So we started LFM that way. In SDM we ran a pilot year. We had a small number of students, I think it was about eight or ten students, and they actually were taking the courses as we were developing them in the first year.

So both of those programs started in sort of this let's jump in, let's learn as we do mode of developing the programs. Again, that's part of what made them pretty heady as we were starting, pretty exciting and pretty challenging as well.

INTERVIEWER: LFM has morphed into something else, correct?

MAGNANTI: Yeah, LFM now is called the Leaders for Global Operations. To me it'll always be LFM.

INTERVIEWER: You've traveled quite a bit in your time at MIT from Sloan to engineering. Can you speak about the interdisciplinary aspects of MIT?

MAGNANTI: Well, I think one of the great attributes of MIT is its fluidity. I think it very much values interdisciplinary education and research. It very much supports interdisciplinary education and research. I think those fluid boundaries are one of the things that makes this a very special place. So even before I had made any of this move to engineering, I had students through the OR Center that I had supervised in aeronautical engineering and civil engineering. Again, that was in part because of the field I was in, but in part because MIT made it easy to do that in terms of this interdisciplinary education.

The OR Center, the Operations Research Center is a rather unusual animal. It reports through the vice president in the research office. It offers its own educational programs. The degrees are actually officially offered by one of the departments because it doesn't offer degrees. But it runs its own educational programs -- it admits its own student, it runs its own exams, it offers courses through the units, so it has no courses and things. So it's a very unusual organization in the sense of having students have an educational responsibilities, but having no faculty resources, no course resources, very limited financial resources. But in a place like MIT it works. Maybe it's a little bit mysterious as to how it works or why it works, but I think in part because MIT values those interdisciplinary interactions and supports the interdisciplinary actions.

INTERVIEWER: You're a co-director of the Interdepartmental Operations Research Center.

MAGNANTI: Yes, for many years. In fact, I was co-director of LFM and the OR Center at the same time. Earlier than that I was head of the Management Science Area and I was also editor of the major journal in my field. Some of us at MIT are a little crazy.

INTERVIEWER: In addition to that you've had visiting scientist appointments at both Bell and GT Laboratories, and been involved with Digital, Saber, Ford Design and others. Can you talk about the value of these sorts of associations with industry? Also, what association should academia have with industry?

MAGNANTI: My Bell Laboratories was a summer activity, so I'd been there in a summer. I had spent a summer there actually in a research organization doing research. GT Labs was a research project that I'd been involved with them. Digital, however, and Saber were quite different. So Digital, actually in the midst of my LFM activities, I was going to take a sabbatical. I spent the first half of that sabbatical in Belgium at a research organization where I'd been earlier in my career. I decided to spend the second half at Digital Equipment, so I was in Maynard, up in the old mill. In part it was I wanted to experience industry first hand. Here I was developing these programs for industry and getting a sense of what goes on.

This fellow named Bill Hanson who was the vice president for manufacturing at Digital at that time -- he later became a co-director of the LFM Program at MIT. Great fellow. He was kind enough to let me sit in on his staff. So I would just be there as sort of a gadfly, fly on the wall, however you want to characterize it. I would attend some of his meetings, I'd have opportunity just to talk to lots of people. Just learn a little bit about what life was like in a corporation. I was also writing a book at that time, and unfortunately, because I was writing the book, I was spending probably more of my time writing a book then really learning as much as I might have at that point. But that was a very worthwhile experience.

My time at Saber was quite a bit different. This, again, was another sabbatical, and I was spending about a week a month in Dallas. They had a small research group, about 25 people, that did many of the methods and algorithms that the airlines use for things like revenue planning. So, if you're going to sell seats on an airplane, how many seats do you sell at what price, when do you release seats, all these type of things. They'd also done routing for the airplanes and scheduling for the airplanes, searching for the crews. All those kind of things that they were doing.

So I went down there, there was another fellow from Georgia Tech who was also similarly doing that. In some ways I mean it was very senior people there but there was a younger people -- it was like having a large group of graduate students in some way. So I got to interact with them. So I got to see industrial problems through that setting. But it was a small R&D group, so it was a little different than sitting in the manufacturing. But again, opened up my eyes to industry and what industry was doing. For me it's been very valuable bringing that back into the classroom and bringing that back into the programs.

The GTE one actually developed into I've had several students since then do internships there and they brought back very interesting problems that we've used for thesis and developed thesis. One student came back and had this thought of an idea of something to do and my original reaction was this is too hard, we can't do this problem, this is just too hard. He persisted and he actually wrote a thesis on it, we ended up writing several papers in that arena. So being motivated by and stimulated by industrial problems and real world problems I think is again, part of the overall gestalt of MIT in terms of its mons and manus, and bringing the world into MIT and MIT into the world.

INTERVIEWER: That was going to be my follow-up question. In terms of your own research, what do you personally think have been the most interesting discoveries that you've made?

MAGNANTI: Interesting discoveries. Well, actually I think the most important thing that I've done is I've written a couple of books, and one book in particular, a second book, has become sort of the major textbook in that area. So the fact that this is working with Jim Orlin in our faculty and another fellow from University of Florida, Ravia Hosha it's sort of become the standard textbook, graduate textbook in this arena. It in some ways synthesizes about a 30- year, 40- year literature, brings it together in a way that I think makes it comprehensive to everybody. It's pretty easily accessible. I think that book has had the most impact of anything I've done in terms of my research.

In terms of my research, I've done some various things on theory. Some just out and out theory for theory sake, which is always good fun, and hopefully of some value to something. Much of my research has been motivated by real problems. So I tend to do theory on real problems. Probably the things that might be most known or best known are some things I've done on designing networks. So if you're a telecom company or if you're a manufacturing company, you need to design a supply chain network, how do you go about designing the networks? So, for example, in telecommunications typically what you want to do is you want to send messages from point A to point B. Your a telecom company, where do you put the links in the network, how do you route over those links. If you're putting in devices such as multiplexors or concentrators, things that take messages and compress them or propagate them, where do you put those devices. So we've done quite a bit of work on developing methods for doing that.

INTERVIEWER: Now when you say "we," I mean this is work that you've done?

MAGNANTI: This is we being me and my students. My students and I. Almost all of my work has been done collaboratively with my students. I've done a few things, just a very few things with faculty colleagues, but mostly it's been with my students.

INTERVIEWER: My next question was going to be how do you feel you have changed or impacted the field, and you just answered that in part. But certainly the textbook must be something you're very proud of. How long has that been used and does it continue to be used?

MAGNANTI: Yeah, I continue to get these small royalty checks. Yeah, it continues to be used. I think it's probably now about 15- years- old, something of that order. I think what are we most proud, I often say I'm most proud of my students. You have these incredible young people that come and they work with you and then they go off and do great things for the world. Along the way, we influence them some. We hopefully help them grow both personally and professionally. We have a great time doing research with them. I seem to have, and maybe it's in my genes, I seem to populate deans type of people. I've had one of my students, Gabriel Bitran, as I mentioned before, has become deputy dean at Sloan. Jane Hammond is a senior deputy dean at Harvard Business School. I've had one who I think is still an associate dean at University of Texas. One was an associate dean at the University of Pittsburgh. I seem to grow these -- maybe it's these administrative instincts that I have or some ways, but pollute them, right?

INTERVIEWER: That is a great accomplishment. I wanted to just step back a little bit and talk about engineering systems again. In delivering the prestigious Brunel Lecture, you cited the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. These achievements include electrification, transportation, airplanes, water supply and distribution, and electronics. How would you characterize the role of engineering systems in these achievements? And as a follow-up, how did MIT contribute to those achievements?

MAGNANTI: Well, if you look at the -- again, this is the National Academy of Engineering at the turn of the century decided to identify these 20 greatest achievements of the last century. It was a very elaborate process. Chuck Vest, our president at the time was involved in this process. The striking thing to me when I looked at that list, and this is what I discussed in this Brunel Lecture was most of them work large- scale technical systems. Electrification is a system. The highway is a system. The internet is a system. These are all very complicated technical systems. In that sense, they provide great opportunities and great challenges for MIT and other places. How do you diagnose such a system, how do you design such a system, how you manage such a system, how do you improve such a system?

Now, I wouldn't say that MIT has been involved in the systems aspect of all those, and in fact, those systems evolved over time often, I would say, in a rather ad hoc fashion. If you think of electrification, you had people like Westinghouse and Edison and other developing uses for this in the system. Over time they grew, right. You can say the same thing for the telephone system. So, Alexander Graham Bell had this idea and eventually sort of these systems grew. But they didn't grow out of any necessarily planned effort in that sense or planned activity. It was sort of organic generic growth, if you will. I think what we try to do to engineering systems, and I think what MIT and other universities are trying to do now is many of the most challenging problems that face society these days are also engineering systems. Think of the environment, energy. There's clearly technology components of this, but there's also how those technologies are deployed to manage in a system where the system has both technical challenges, as well as political and social challenges [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. That's what MIT's trying to do in this arena of engineering systems and it's developed the wherewithal for doing that.

Now I tend to view myself, as an engineering systems guy in the sense of I look at networks and look at these systems and stuff. But my own work has tended to be sort of the mathematical modeling of these where I think engineering systems more broadly that would be one component of it, but it is also how you architect those systems, how do you think about the political landscape, the social landscape and all that. So I wouldn't point to MIT contributing to the system aspects of those, though I would point to it now as trying to address those systems and trying to improve in terms of providing the wherewithall to improve them.