Video Excerpt

IRV
In 1957, you left Princeton and went to the Rand Corporation. Who was there?

PHIL
Dantzig was the big attraction, and there were a lot of other great people there. Ray Fulkerson and Lloyd Shapley were closest to my area of work; David Gale was a visitor during my first year; and people like Oliver Gross and Selmer Johnson added to the excitement. It was the ideal place for what I wanted to do.

It was almost a pure research environment. George Dantzig had the wisdom and foresight not to rely entirely on the U.S. Air Force or on the scientific achievements, but had a lot of contacts in industry.

George told me a story in the very early days about giving a speech before a consortium of oil companies in Los Angeles. At the end of the speech, he was told how great his speech was.

He presented what he thought linear programming could do to improve oil refinery production, and somebody said, "How much of an improvement do you think you could produce?" And George said, "Oh, somewhere between one and three percent." And the audience thought, "Here's somebody who is certainly not bullshitting us. We believe that."

IRV
What was the motivation for Rand to form a research group at the time?

PHIL
I was never familiar with the whole structure of the Rand Corporation, but as I understood it, Rand was given a great deal of freedom to decide what sorts of research problems would be in the national interest.

This was due in large part to John Williams, director of the mathematics department for a long time. The theory of games had an obvious potential military application, and certainly the air force's linear programming research could be of great general interest in improving the efficiency of operations.

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