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Part I

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Management Science

Getting through a typical day can be a challenge: getting to or from school or your job on time; finding a parking spot when you are late for a date; making sure you have food in the refrigerator or getting to your favorite fast-food restaurant to stay properly fed and “fueled” with coffee; making sure your body is fit by getting to the gym or exercising at home; and seeing the doctor for a regular checkup or when you are ill. While your personal life may seem complex, consider what goes on at any of the large, modern medical centers found across America, in cities and on university campuses. In a typical 24-hour period, babies will be born; people will die; a friend may need an emergency appendectomy; and a relative may need treatment for a heart attack, asthma attack, stroke, or puncture wound. And there are the more mundane things: blood tests, mammograms, garden variety X-rays, CT and MRI scans, elective surgery to remove a cyst, or a routine checkup. Medical centers need many kinds of workers to make them hum: doctors and nurses with different specialties, technicians of different kinds, workers who pay attention to the “business” aspects of the medical center—not to mention people who prepare food for the patients, clean the premises, or plow the access roads after a snowstorm.

So what does this have to do with mathematics? To deal with the emergencies and day-in and day-out demands, there must be specialists (doctors, nurses, technicians, etc.) and other workers either physically present or available by phone. The part of mathematics concerned with efficient operations of businesses and governments is called operations research (OR) or management science. The domain of OR includes resource allocation, scheduling, queues (waiting lines), inventory analysis, routing problems, and cost minimization, to mention but a few of OR’s growing areas of applicability. Medical centers rely on the expertise of mathematical specialists to make their operations run smoothly day and night, rain or shine, winter or summer, so that when you or your loved ones need to use the center, its services are there for you.

Chalk up another triumph for OR! What follows will help you, too, to know about and use such tools.