Abraham Charnes and W.W. Cooper (et al.): A brief history of a long collaboration in developing industrial uses of linear programming

This paper describes a research strategy and its results, which guided a 40+ year collaboration between Abraham Charnes and William W. Cooper, which was initiated in a research center established at the (then) new Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). Initiated in collaboration with Bob Mellon of Gulf Oil Company, this strategy involved on-site collaborations with company personnel in more than 100 different companies and government agencies. An appendix to this paper describes the efforts of another team working from the same research center. This team, consisting of Charles Holt, Franco Modigliani, John Muth, and Herbert A. Simon, used a different research strategy with an accompanying application that also had important impacts on operations research/management science and other disciplines.