User:Technical 13/Drafts/Arnold Reisman

Arnold Reisman was born in Lodz Poland in 1934 and emigrated to the US in 1946 having spent the war years in the Soviet Union where his father took the family after three months of being under Nazi occupation in Lodz. The family endured a year in Siberia then left for the Crimea only to be forced to flee once again to Krasnodar. His father and older brother were drafted into the Russian army and Reisman, his mother and sister were taken to a collective farm near the Iranian border whee they contracted malaria. His sister perished and he and his mother left for Stalino. Ate the age of 10, Reisman decided to try and find his father which he did. He found his father in Tbilisi, Georgia and reunited him with his mother.. The family reached New York in 1946.

After graduating from Stuyvesant Math and Science school, he left for California and received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in engineering from UCLA and was a registered Professional Engineer in California, Wisconsin, and Ohio. After 27 years as Professor of Operations Research at Case Western Reserve University. He rose to chair his department and chose early retirement in 1994.

As a young man he helped design telescopes and power plants. As an expert witness and consultant, Reisman testified or consulted for several state, federal and private organizations, from the Ohio Department of Insurance, he had urged Blue Cross to fight healthcare inflation instead of passing it on to customers,  to baseball's St. Louis Cardinals where he found that the first free agent ballplayers were poor investments. In the early 1990's he worked with various companies in the Krasnodar region where he had lived as a child, helping them to enter the free market.

He organized a show in 1992 of modern Russian artists at Cleveland Play House and the Beck Center.

During 1999-2009, he was an invited Visiting Scholar in Turkey at Sabanci University, Istanbul Technical University  and Ozyegin University working with students and faculty alike

He lectured and taught in Turkey, Israel, Hawaii and elsewhere. He wrote about 300 articles and 24 books, several about Turkey's relationships with Jews and the last one, finished after his death by his wife, Ellen, about the about the Turkish/ Armenian conflict.

An eclectic man, Reisman made furniture and large, abstract sculptures. He exhibited at the Galleria, Agnon School and elsewhere. He sculpted a two-ton block of stone at Istanbul's Sabanci University.

"Through his remarkable work, Professor Reisman... brought people of diverse backgrounds closer together and enlightened many," Namik Tan, Turkish ambassador to the U.S., wrote to the professor's family.

Arnold Reisman died on April 11, 2011.