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Mathematical Management – Operations Research in the United States and Western Europe, 1945 – 1990
Richard Vahrenkamp 1,*
Affiliation
Article Info
1 Professor em. for Logistics, Universiry of Kassel
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The rise of Operations Research, which provides mathematical models for the management of commercial enterprises, in the political knowledge culture of Cold War Science is shown and then transferred to the institutionalization of Operations Research in Europe and in the Federal Republic of Germany. The predecessor organizations of the German Society for Operations Research are presented and the interaction of the annual conference of this society with the conferences on a European and worldwide level. It tells how numerous chairs for corporate research and operations research were founded at universities between 1960 and 1980. The connection between Operations Research and the macroeconomic field of econometrics in chairs, conferences and publications is explained and problematized. The great flood of publications on the subject of Operations Research between 1960 and 1980 is referred to, but the rise of the competing field of business informatics in the 1980s halted the success of Ope