H. Martin Weingartner

Brief Biography

Hans Martin Weingartner was born in Heidelberg, Germany. He and his family escaped the Nazi regime in 1939 after his father’s release from Dachau concentration camp. Weingartner attended public schools in New York City and went on to the University of Chicago. Early on he was involved in the growth of the university’s Graduate School of Business and received three degrees there between 1950 & 1951. After graduation, he worked at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington prior to serving in the United States Army during and after the Korean War. Weingartner resumed his education at Carnegie-Mellon University, studying under operations research/management science community leaders William W. Cooper, Merton H. Miller, Herbert A. Simon, and Franco Modigliani. Coming from an economics background, Weingartner’s research reflected the application of OR techniques to financial problems.

After receiving a PhD in economics, Weingartner held academic posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1964-1966) and the University of Rochester (1966-1977). In 1977, he moved to the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Weingartner was responsible for building the program’s faculty and was described by peers as the “academic conscience of the school.” He co-authored the first book on capital budgeting written from an OR perspective, Mathematical Programming and the Analysis of Capital Budgeting Problems (1963). In bringing OR to finance as a consultant to various firms, Weingartner employed linear and dynamic programming to such problem areas as budgeting and investment decision making.

Weingartner was an active member of The Institute of Management Science (TIMS). As Vice President of Finance, he employed his own methodology of financial reform to the organization. Weingartner reorganized the investment function of TIMS, ending the policy of investing exclusively in low interest Certificates of Deposit by adding stock mutual funds to the portfolio. Working alongside the investment committee (then headed by Herbert Ayers), he selected Stein, Roe & Farnum to be the investment advising agency to deploy funds not needed for operating purposes. He divided TIMS capital into two separate funds, creating a “Quasi-Endowment Fund to finance emergency response and fresh initiatives, such as new journals and publications. This allowed for future projects to be more financed without a major fundraising campaign.

As the thirty-second president of TIMS, Weingartner completed the process of “unbundling” the organization’s journals, so that members could select which individual journal subscriptions they wanted, rather than having to pay for the entire catalogue. As president, he became the TIMS member of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP), a national organization that hears reports about science policy and meets with Congressional representatives. Responding to a request from a Congressional subcommittee chairman, Weingartner organized and led a committee on the potential government policy of outsourcing the publication of various government statistical reports. After his term, he remained with CSSP as an alumni member.

Weingartner was an avid sailor and boat racer, serving on the Board of the Harbor Island Yacht Club in Tennessee. He retired from Vanderbilt in 1998 as the school’s first Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Finance. Weingartner passed away at age eighty-five.

Other Biographies

INFORMS. Miser-Harris Presidential Gallery: H. Martin Weingartner. Accessed March 30, 2015. (link)