Sidney W. Hess

Brief Biography

Sidney Hess was born in Ames, Iowa and served as the twenty-third President of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS). Hess studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, afterwards joining the U.S. Army. Having taken a year of graduate-level chemical engineering courses, Hess was assigned to the Army’s Chemical Corps Operations Research Group. Knowing little to nothing about operations research, on the suggestion of his superiors Hess read George E. Kimball and Philip Morse’s Methods of Operations Research (1952). Hess familiarized himself with probability, anti-submarine warfare, and simulation before starting his own work on modeling gas cloud behavior under varying meteorological conditions.

 After two years in the Army, Hess learned of the new OR graduate program at Case Institute of Technology. Persuaded by Case Professor Leonard Arnoff at an Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) meeting in Washington, Hess joined the Case group as a research assistant. There, he studied under such OR pioneers as C. West Churchman and Russell Ackoff, working on inventory control, distribution, R&D management, and marketing science. Hess graduated with one of the first Operations Research PhDs in the United States.

Hess has led a balanced professional career of OR practice and education. He was first employed at Atlas Chemical Industries before accepting an associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School in 1966. He returned to industry as Director of Pharmaceutical Development at ICI Americas, retiring as Vice President and General Manager of the company’s Aerospace Division. For the next decade (1986-1996), Hess taught management at Drexel University.

Hess’s research has largely focused on the modeling and implementation of solutions for real-world problems. In 1965, he and four others offered the first OR and computational programming solution to political redistricting. This process was later adapted to the realignment of sales territories. Using decision trees and dynamic programming, Hess has also made advances in the process of selecting research and development projects.

Having served as TIMS secretary for six years, Hess was elected president 1976. After his term, he remained very active with the organization. Hess organized the first Gordon Research Conference on OR which evolved into the annual Colleges of Practice, Marketing, and Information Science summer workshops. He was also a founding member of the Management Sciences Roundtable and helped ease the climate of animosity that existed between ORSA and TIMS. Hess played a major role in uniting the two organizations and chaired the subcommittee that recommended the name and logo of their successor, the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). For his service, he received the TIMS Distinguished Service Medal in 1982 and was elected an inaugural Fellow of INFORMS in 2002.

Other Biographies

(1962) About the Authors: Sidney W. Hess. IRE Transactions on Engineering Management, 9(4): 187. (link)

INFORMS. Miser-Harris Presidential Gallery: Sidney W. Hess. Accessed March 12, 2015. (link)

Sidney W. Hess (2015) Interview by Barry List, November 2, 2015.  Video by David Tavani,  Philadelphia, PA

Barry List Interviews Sidney W. Hess, November 2, 2015

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