By Salah E. Elmaghraby

This past June marked the anniversary of the death of a giant in industrial engineering and operations research, Professor Loring G. (Jack) Mitten. He died on June 19, 2000, and his departure left a void that is felt by all who knew Jack, either as students (like myself) or as colleagues.

I first met Jack in August 1954. I had been admitted to the Ohio State University Department of Industrial Engineering, and had arrived "fresh" from a train trip from New York City where my ship had landed the day before. He looked me over and said, "I don't know much about Egyptians, but here are four books. Read them and Gene Richman (the late Professor Eugene Richman, of the department of IE at OSU) shall examine you in one month on all four of them."

I couldn't believe my ears, since each book was a text for a one-quarter term course (one was Feller's book on probability, volume 1), so I asked my friend Mohamed I. Dessouky, who was studying for his master's under Mitten at the time, what to do. He said that I better study the books and do well in the exam, or else I would have no future at OSU! I did, and I must have passed the exam with flying colors because Jack became the chair of my master's committee, and a year later I co-authored a paper with Gene Richman on a problem he cited in his class.

This episode describes the "essential Jack Mitten." He was a man who set the bar high — if you pass, in his book you are "OK" for the rest of life. If not, he didn't want to have anything to do with you. And this was not only in academic matters, but in all matters of life.

Jack was non-traditional; he would come to class in his T-shirt and loafers. He was almost devoid of any biases or prejudices; he accepted you for what you "really" are. You could not fool him, because he had the insight to see through the "armor" that one normally puts around oneself.

Jack was a kind and compassionate man, totally devoted to his students. They reciprocated his devotion with love and admiration. In June 1955, he was leaving for a three-week vacation. When I learned of his imminent departure, I was devastated because I had just finished the first draft of my master's thesis and was ready to show it to him, get his feedback and finalize it for graduation in August. My whole future depended on this, since I was leaving for Cornell to complete my studies for the Ph.D. there. When I told him of my situation his answer was "give me the draft," which he took (all 38 pages of them) and left town. A week later I received some 16 hand-written pages of detailed comments on it, replete with new derivations of some of my results. I incorporated them into my thesis, which was ready upon his return from vacation, and graduated in August as planned. He literally saved my life.

Jack taught in the classroom like all others, but he also taught by example. He conducted an "informal seminar" with the graduate students in which we discussed whatever came to mind. No prepared talks, no overhead slides, and no sleek presentations. Just honest to goodness exchange of views among senior and budding scholars.

Once Jack started discussing a truck-scheduling problem that he and Jay Minas were working on. The work was incomplete, but the ideas involved in it were novel and exciting to him. At one point in his presentation he mentioned an elaborate scheme for designating the reversal of direction along the truck route, and I happened to interject that it may be possible to achieve the same result with the simple reversal of sign of some variable. He stopped abruptly, thought for a moment about what I said, but said nothing. I never gave it a second thought. Three years later his work with Minas appeared in Operations Research with a footnote thanking me for "valuable suggestions concerning the formulation of this problem." I learned my first lesson in correct ethical behavior in research.

Jack was an "outdoorsman." He loved nature. He loved to contemplate its beauty and its wonders. He enjoyed camping, hiking, trail blazing or anything that has anything to do with the outdoors. He invited his students to his house where we had dinners, outdoors, of course. We all knew that, and loved him for it.

When Jack died last year of cancer, his former student Dick Francis (now a professor at the University of Florida) thought that the best memorial we, Jack's students, could build for him must be "outdoors." Dick worked tirelessly with Jack's family to establish part of the Canadian Continental Trail in Jack's name. There it stands today, an everlasting memorial to Jack's love of nature, and of our love for Jack.

Salah E. Elmaghraby is a University Professor at North Carolina State University.