After receiving such great response and feedback at the plenary talk Professor George Nemhauser gave at EURO-INFORMS, he agreed to present the talk to a group of graduate students at Georgia Tech. This fascinating and informative talk, called Integer Programming: The Global Impact, was recorded and is available for download at: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/49829

Integer programming is the name for optimization models and algorithms in which some variables are required to have integer values. Planning and operational problems in energy, finance, health, manufacturing, military, transportation, and in almost any imaginable domain where decisions are made, are formulated and solved using integer programming.

For example, most Fortune 500 companies use integer programming in some aspects of their business. Currently available software is capable of solving models with thousands, and sometimes millions, of variables and constraints. Nemhauser discussed integer programming models whose solutions have had big impact in solving important problems, and presented recent progress that has made it possible to solve very large instances and to obtain good solutions quickly. In addition, he speculated on future advances in methodology and applications.

Nemhauser is the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor in ISyE. He received a Ph.D. in operations research from Northwestern University in 1961, and joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University where he remained until 1969. In 1970, he joined Cornell University as a professor in operations research and industrial engineering and served as school director from 1977 to 1983. He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Leeds, U.K., and the University of Louvain, Belgium and the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has served the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) as council member, president, and editor of Operations Research, and he is past chair of the Mathematical Programming Society. He was the founding editor of Operations Research Letters, and founding co-editor of Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science.