Brown CS Blog

Irv Lustig ‘83 P’13, a Brown CS alum, has been named one of twelve 2021 INFORMS Fellows, an acknowledgement of a lifetime of achievement. INFORMS Fellows are examples of significant contributors in operations research and the management sciences, and Irv’s award comes from having demonstrated exceptional accomplishments as both an academic and in the optimization software industry. Irv has also contributed via service to the profession by volunteering on numerous INFORMS committees, including starting a project to do oral history interviews of luminaries in operations research. As many of Irv's INFORMS colleagues have written, Irv’s recognition was long overdue. 

Irv received ScB and ScM degrees in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Brown University and a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University. He is the first Applied Mathematics/Computer Science concentrator at Brown and worked with both departments back then “to push them to create the concentration.” As for his professional career, Irv joined Princeton Consultants from IBM Research, where he “cultivated approaches for optimization/business integration.” At Princeton Consultants, he leads their development of custom optimization software. Irv has also authored more than 30 articles and scientific papers and has also received the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for excellence in computational mathematical programming. Currently, Irv leads Princeton Consultants’ sales and implementation efforts to develop optimization based solutions for clients in a wide range of industries. In 1978, for Irv’s Brown application, he wrote about how he wanted to learn how to do math on a computer. Now, in 2021 he “is still doing math on a computer today, and still enjoys it!”

What’s next for Irv? “Retirement!” Even though he still has not decided when that will happen, saying that he’s “having too much fun working on solving problems for Princeton Consultants’ customers.” Irv understands the significance and challenge of a Brown Computer Science degree. He emphasizes that “it’s not about learning specific computer languages or tools, it’s about learning how to think about problems and solve those problems in a structured, disciplined way. Throughout the Brown curriculum, even outside of the hard sciences, problem solving is what you’re really learning how to do.”

To learn more about the INFORMS Fellowship and the other recipients, click here.  

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication and Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.