World Class Faculty & Research / April 22, 2020

Golden Wins Mathematics Research Award

Bruce L. Golden, the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science in the department of Decision, Operations and Information Technologies at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, and two of his Ph.D. students have won the 2020 Trevor Evans Award from the Mathematical Association of America.

Each year, the Mathematical Association of America, the world's largest community of mathematicians, math students, and math enthusiasts, presents the award to the authors of an exceptional article that is accessible to undergraduates, published during the previous year in the journal Math Horizons. The award is named for a distinguished Emory University mathematician. Golden and his students, Sanaz Aliari and Eric Oden, will be honored at the association’s yearly meeting for their research, published in October 2019.

The paper, "Experimental Graph Theory," grew out of a difficult homework assignment in a Ph.D. course on network optimization taught by Golden in 2018. Graph theory is a field of mathematics that is closely related to the study of transportation and telecommunication networks, which is of great interest in the field of operations research. The winning paper described how the authors used computational experimentation to "guess" the answers to unsolved graph theory questions. The insight gained from the computational study enabled the authors to prove new graph theory results.

This is the latest in a string of awards for Golden, who in October 2019, won the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science from the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society. That was his third lifetime achievement award in less than three years. He previously won the 2018 George E. Kimball Medal from INFORMS and was selected as the second VeRoLog Fellow (and first non-European) in 2017 by the board of the European Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and his master’s and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1976. His research interests include transportation science and logistics, combinatorial optimization, and healthcare analytics. Golden is the longtime editor-in-chief of the journal Networks. Before that, he was the editor-in-chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing. He has received numerous research and teaching awards. He has been an INFORMS Fellow since 2004.

Golden has also received many contracts and grants, consulted for top organizations and served on the boards of several Maryland-based tech companies. He also co-founded a business logistics consulting company and vehicle-routing software company, both of which he and his partners grew and sold. 

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About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master’s, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.

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