Department History
The Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics had its origins in the fall of 1946, when an undergraduate curriculum in industrial engineering was first introduced in response to requests from returning military veterans, who constituted nearly half the entering class in the School of Engineering that semester. In 1947, Robert H. Roy was appointed Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and was asked to develop a program in Industrial Engineering. Roy's appointment led to the creation of the Department of Industrial Engineering in 1950, with an initial faculty of three members. The Department was founded with an emphasis on the abstract study of complex operational systems in people and machines, rather than the more utilitarian studies, which had characterized other engineering curricula. Accordingly, the first two years of the undergraduate program provided basic training in chemistry, physics, mathematics and the principles of accounting, while the third and fourth years concentrated on industrial organization, production methods, labor relations, business regulations, political economy and psychology. The graduate program emphasized production organization and industrial-business management.
With the demand for engineering and business graduates remaining high, the 1950s witnessed rapid growth in the Department. By the end of the decade, the number of faculty had increased to seven, with their specialties extending from industrial organization and management to statistics and accounting. The number of undergraduate majors in industrial engineering averaged twenty each year after 1954, while the number of graduate degrees rose from two in 1956 to seven in 1960.
In 1964, the Department was renamed the Department of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, reflecting the increasing importance of operations research in the Department's academic program. During the 1960s, the department grew steadily under the leadership of Robert H. Roy, who served as Chairman from 1950 until 1972. When the School of Engineering Sciences merged with the Faculty of Philosophy to form the School of Arts and Sciences in 1966, the Department became part of Arts and Sciences.
In the 1970s the Department expanded dramatically, and, with its nineteen faculty members in the late 1970s, became one of the largest departments in the University. Student enrollment, especially at the graduate level, increased substantially; by 1979, there were twenty-four Bachelor of Arts, eight Masters, and two Ph.D. degrees conferred by the Department. Roger A. Horn chaired the Department from 1973 to 1978, during this period of expansion. In 1973 the Department was renamed the Department of Mathematical Sciences and began emphasizing the use of mathematical methods to solve the problems raised by the natural sciences (astronomy, physics and chemistry), as well as the modern sciences (operations research, demography, management science, psychology, information science and computer science).
Maintaining its concentration on modern applied mathematics to the present day, the Department developed five major training and research areas: (1) probability and statistics; (2) operations research and optimization; (3) discrete mathematics; (4) matrix analysis; and (5) computational mathematics. In the 1980s, while the undergraduate program experienced a slight decrease in number of students, the graduate program continued its expansion. In 1985, twenty-three Masters and five Ph.D. degrees were conferred by the Department.
In 2004, the Department changed its name to Applied Mathematics and Statistics, reflecting its commitment to mathematics important in applications. Since Roger Horn left the chairmanship of the Department in 1979, there have been six successors: William H. Huggins, 1979-1980; Robert J. Serfling, 1981-1984 and 1986-1988; Alan F. Karr, 1985; John C. Wierman, 1988-2000; Edward R. Scheinerman, 2000-2004; and Daniel Q. Naiman, 2004-present.