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Harold P. Benson

Harold Philip Benson (born 1949) [1] is an American operations researcher and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida. He was the American Economics Institutions Professor of the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM) at The University of Florida [2].

Academic and professional life

He received his B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1971, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1973 and 1976, respectively. [3]. His dissertation, in the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Management Sciences at Northwestern University, was supervised by Thomas L. Morin, the academic grandson of Richard. E. Bellman [4].

During 1975-1976, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois. From 1976 to 1979,  he worked at the General Motors Research Laboratories as an Associate Senior Research Engineer. In 1979, he joined the ISOM Department of the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration as an assistant professor, where he became a tenured associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1990. He was a Visiting Associate Professor in the College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1985-1986. In 2013, he retired as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida.

Benson was an Associate Editor for many years of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications and of the Journal of Global Optimization. In addition, he served as an Associate Editor of three additional journals in mathematical analysis and operations research, and he was on the Editorial Boards of four international journals in the fields of operations research, mathematics and economics. He also served on the Editorial Board of Mathematical Reviews. He was a founding member of the INFORMS Section on Multiple Criteria Decision Making in 2010.

Research

Benson’s research concerns mainly multiple criteria decision making (MCDM), global optimization and their applications. He used a variety of tools to explore and create solution methods for problems in these areas. He invented what is now called Benson’s Algorithm [5], which finds all of the efficient extreme points and the full weakly efficient set of a multiple objective linear program. He helped to define and explore properly efficient solutions of nonlinear vector optimization problems [4]. In global optimization, he focused a good portion of his work on the theory and solution of concave minimization problems [4].

Academic and research awards and honors

As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Benson was a James B. Angell Scholar and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Operations Research to attend Northwestern University from 1971 to 1974. In 2004, he received the Georg Cantor Award from the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making for his achievements in the theory, methodology and practices of multiple criteria decision making [6]. In 2008, he was recognized as among the most productive MCDM researchers in the world [6]. He was honored as one of the 42 world leading researchers in the history of MCDM in 2011 [1].

References

[1] Koksalan, Murat, Wallenius, Jyrki, and Zionts, Stanley, Multiple Criteria Decision Making, World Scientific, Hackensack, New Jersey, 2011, p. 97. [2] https://news.warrington.ufl.edu › tag › harold-benson-5457 [3] https://apps.warrington.ufl.edu/Directory/uploads/vita/harold-benson-5457-cv.pdf [4] https://academictree.org/math/publications.php?pid=348151 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson%27s_algorithm [6] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10957-018-1315-4