Frederick S. Hillier is professor emeritus of operations research at Stanford University. Dr. Hillier is especially known for his classic, award-winning text, Introduction to Operations Research, co-authored with the late Gerald J. Lieberman, which has been translated into well over a dozen languages and is currently in its 8th edition. The 6th edition won honorable mention for the 1995 Lanchester Prize (best English-language publication of any kind in the field) and Dr. Hillier also was awarded the 2004 INFORMS Expository Writing Award for the 8th edition. His other books include The Evaluation of Risky Interrelated Investments, Queueing Tables and Graphs, Introduction to Stochastic Models in Operations Research, and Introduction to Mathematical Programming. He received his BS in industrial engineering and doctorate specializing in operations research and management science from Stanford University. The winner of many awards in high school and college for writing, mathematics, debate, and music, he ranked first in his undergraduate engineering class and was awarded three national fellowships (National Science Foundation, Tau Beta Pi, and Danforth) for graduate study. Dr. Hillier’s research has extended into a variety of areas, including integer programming, queueing theory and its application, statistical quality control, and production and operations management. He also has won a major prize for research in capital budgeting. Twice elected a national officer of professional societies, he has served in many important professional and editorial capacities. For example, he served The Institute of Management Sciences as vice president for meetings, chairman of the publications committee, associate editor of Management Science, and co-general chairman of an international meeting. He currently is continuing to serve as the founding series editor for the International Series in Operations Research and Management Science for Springer Science + Business Media. He has had visiting appointments at Cornell University, the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie-Mellon University, the Technical University of Denmark, the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and the Judge Institute of Management Studies at the University of Cambridge (England).

Mark S. Hillier, son of Fred Hillier, is associate professor of quantitative methods at the School of Business at the University of Washington. Dr. Hillier received his BS in engineering (plus a concentration in computer science) from Swarthmore College, and he received his MS with distinction in operations research and PhD in industrial engineering and engineering management from Stanford University. As an undergraduate, he won the McCabe Award for ranking first in his engineering class, won election to Phi Beta Kappa based on his work in mathematics, set school records on the men’s swim team, and was awarded two national fellowships (National Science Foundation and Tau Beta Pi) for graduate study. During that time, he also developed a comprehensive software tutorial package, OR Courseware, for the Hillier- Lieberman textbook, Introduction to Operations Research. As a graduate student, he taught a PhD-level seminar in operations management at Stanford and won a national prize for work based on his PhD dissertation. At the University of Washington, he currently teaches courses in management science and spreadsheet modeling. He has won several MBA teaching awards for the core course in management science and his elective course in spreadsheet modeling, as well as a universitywide teaching award for his work in teaching undergraduate classes in operations management. He also has been awarded an appointment to the Evert McCabe Endowed Faculty Fellowship. His research interests include issues in component commonality, inventory, manufacturing, and the design of production systems. A paper by Dr. Hillier on component commonality won an award for best paper of 2000–2001 in IIE Transactions.