William W. Cooper

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William Wager Cooper (July 23, 1914 – June 20, 2012) was an American

The Institute of Management Sciences, founding editor-in-chief of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University), founding dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs (now the Heinz College) at CMU, the former Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University, and the Foster Parker Professor Emeritus of Management, Finance and Accounting at the University of Texas at Austin.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Biography

William Wager Cooper was born on July 23, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama.[5] He grew up in Chicago, where his father (a former bookkeeper) owned several gasoline stations that closed in the Great Depression.[1][2] Cooper, in his second year of high school, dropped out to help support his family.[1][2] He worked in a bowling alley, on a golf course, and as a professional boxer.[1][2][5] As a boxer, he won 58 bouts, lost three, and drew two.[1] While commuting to the golf course, he met Eric Kohler, a professor at Northwestern University, who pushed him to go back to school and bankrolled his entry to the University of Chicago.[1][2] At Chicago, he began studying physical chemistry but was inspired by his work for Kohler on a legal case to switch to economics,[1][2] graduating with a B.A. and Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1938.[2][5]

After graduation, from 1938 to 1940, he worked as an accountant for the

American Institute of Accountants for the best paper of the year.[1][2][5]

Cooper began his academic career with a brief teaching stint, from 1944 to 1946, back at the University of Chicago.[5] In 1945, Cooper married his wife Ruth, a lawyer and human activist, and in 1946 he joined the newly formed Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University). There, he formed important research collaborations with Abraham Charnes, George Leland Bach, and Herbert A. Simon, and eventually became University Professor.[1][3][4] While at CMU, from 1949 to 1950, he also worked again as an assistant to Eric Kohler, who had by this time become Comptroller of the Marshall Plan.[2] In 1969 he left GSIA but stayed at CMU, becoming dean of the new School of Urban and Public Affairs (now the Heinz College) there. As dean, he realized that there would soon be a much greater role in American business management for African-Americans, and worked to increase African-American representation within the school.[3]

In 1975, Harvard University hired Cooper away from CMU to become the Dickinson Professor of Accounting, and in 1980 he moved again, to the University of Texas at Austin, where he became the Foster Parker Professor of Management, Finance and Accounting. He retired in 1993, but continued to be active in research until his death on June 20, 2012.[1][3][4][5]

Professional activities

In the early 1950s,

The Institute of Management Sciences.[8] William Cooper's wife Ruth helped draft the Institute's charter;[5] Cooper himself was elected as its first president,[3][4] and Andrew Vázsonyi became its first past president (without previously having been president).[9] ORSA and TIMS later merged in 1995 to form the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.[10]

Cooper was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory.[4][5] The journal is published by the American Accounting Association; its first issue appeared in 1981.[11]

He served as president of the Accounting Researchers International Association in 1986.[2][4][12]

Research

Cooper's research has been characterized both by its high volume and by the high diversity of its subjects, which fall into three major areas: economics, accounting, and management science and operations research.[6] He wrote or co-authored more than 500 research articles and wrote or edited 27 books,[4] including works on

non-linear programming, goal programming, least absolute deviations and fractional programming.[1][5]
His work moved business education from a largely anecdotal field towards greater interdisciplinarity and greater mathematical rigor.[1][3] He made many innovations in the design of organizations, as well as applying mathematical optimization in such applications as the application of antidiscriminatory policies to the armed forces' management of personnel and to resource allocation in advertising campaigns.[5]

His most celebrated publication is a 1978 paper with

linear program.[6] The paper in which Cooper developed this method was included among 30 "most influential papers" in the European Journal of Operational Research.[5] Another of Cooper's publications, a 1984 paper on production estimation co-authored with Rajiv Banker, has been one of the five most cited papers in Management Science.[5]
In 1982, with Abraham Charnes and Richard Duffin, Cooper won the John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences "for their fundamental contributions to optimization methods, concepts, and models for problems of decision, planning and design", covering work in "a multitude of fields including: linear programming and inequalities, goals and chance-constrained programming, geometric programming, infinite dimensional and convex programming, network modeling and analysis, fractional and interval programming, prediction and stochastic decision rules, and game theory."[13] He also won the 1986 US Comptroller General Award for Significant Contributions to the US General Accounting Office and the Mehr Award of the American Risk and Insurance Association for his work on predicting insolvency.[5]

Cooper was given four honorary degrees: an M.A. from

INFORMS in 2002.[5] At the University of Texas, as well as holding his named chair there, he was a Nadja Kozmetsky Scott Centennial Fellow, and a Janie Slaughter Briscoe Centennial Fellow.[4]

In 1986, he served as the American Accounting Association's Distinguished International Visiting Professor in Latin America.

In 1990, he received the American Accounting Association's Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1990.[14]

In 1993, Cooper was honored by a festschrift on the occasion of his 75th birthday.[15]

In 2006, Cooper was inducted into the hall of fame of the

Max M. Fisher College of Business.[2]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Leahy, Cory (June 20, 2012), "Professor William W. Cooper, Pioneer In Operations Research, Dies At 97", McCombs Today, University of Texas at Austin, archived from the original on November 3, 2012, retrieved October 17, 2012.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l The Accounting Hall of Fame: William Wager Cooper, retrieved 2012-10-16.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g "Obituary: William W. Cooper, Pioneer in Management Science, Founding Father Of Carnegie Mellon's GSIA, First Dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs", Carnegie Mellon News, Carnegie Mellon University, June 21, 2012.
  4. ^
    INFORMS
    , retrieved 2012-10-15.
  5. ^
    doi:10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00554_t.x
    .
  6. ^
    S2CID 153002576
    .
  7. ISBN 978-1-4419-6280-5
    .
  8. JSTOR 25062251
    .
  9. ^ Gass, Saul I. (February 2004), "In Memoriam Andrew (Andy) Vazsonyi: 1916-2003. Operations research/management science pioneer, educator, researcher, illustrator and author helped shape profession", OR/MS Today.
  10. doi:10.1287/opre.47.1.16
    .
  11. ^ Ward, D. Dewey (August 1990), The Auditing Section: Reflections on a Fourteen Year History, Auditing Section, American Accounting Association, archived from the original on 2010-06-16, retrieved 2012-10-16.
  12. ^ William W. Cooper Professional Biography, Online Companion for "Abraham Charnes and W. W. Cooper (et at.): A Brief History of a Long Collaboration in Developing Industrial Uses of Linear Programming", Operations Research Volume 50, Number 1, January–February 2002, retrieved 2012-10-16.
  13. INFORMS
    , retrieved 2012-10-16.
  14. ^ "Outstanding Accounting Educator Award". Archived from the original on 2013-10-03. Retrieved 2013-09-27.
  15. ^ Ijiri, Yuji, ed. (1993), Creative and Innovative Approaches to the Science of Management: a volume in honor of Wm. W. Cooper on his 75th birthday, Quorum Books.

External links

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