Whats been the reaction of the conference attendees to the book?
A lot of them haven’t read the book yet, but they have read excerpts. I hope they understand that this is a book that’s meant to communicate a certain amount of what they do to a very broad audience, an audience that is not technically focused. In some cases, I’m sure they think the book over-simplifies or doesn’t do justice to the complexity of what they do. But I think they can appreciate a book that can reach a general audience and says, “Look, these people are doing really interesting and important stuff.” In the book, you mention Brenda Dietrich, the past president of INFORMS. Yes. She’s Samer’s boss at IBM. She helped me understand algorithms. She told me that “wash, rinse, repeat” what you read on a bottle of shampoo is actually an algorithm. She was very helpful in that area. I also talked to Pierre Haren, co-founder of ILOG, who’s definitely an O.R. person. You mention “operations research” a few times in the book, but mostly you use the term “analytics” to include much of wha
