Hi everybody this is Scott said I hope that your week is off to a good start today I

wanted to spend a few minutes discussing the field of operations research and

how it is relevant to the manner by which our policy makers have

handled the COVID response. I discuss in the parasitic mind

operations research briefly, but let me mention it again.

I've actually mentioned it in other contexts as well.

Operations research is an

applied mathematics field where you're trying to maximize or minimize an objective. So for example, take the classic example of the traveling salesman problem.

So you have a salesman who's going to visit X number of cities, A, B, C, D, E, F.

He could only go to one city once and then return to the starting point.

What is the order in which he should visit the cities so that he can minimize the travel time or the gas cost.

So in this case it's a minimization problem.

Now when the number of cities are very few,

then you can actually manually try out each of the different options to see which is the optimal one.

But imagine that he has to visit 38 cities, then it becomes impossible to do so manually.

So you usually, well not usually you would use an algorithm stemming

from operations research where a prescriptive path is provided for you. So in the business school many, many problems,

nature in general, but in the business school many problems are

manifestations of either something that you're trying to maximize,

maximize profits subject to these production costs

or minimize the waiting time, the cues for customers. So all kinds of scheduling algorithms

stem from operations research. So nature, and certainly the applied manifestations of problems that we tackle in nature involve you trying to

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