Philip McCord Morse, born August 6, 1903, died September 5, 1985 was an American physicst, administrator and pioneer of operations research in World War II. Morse graduated from the Case School of Applied Science in 1926 with a B.S. in physics. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1929. In 1930, he was granted an International Fellowship, which he used to do postgraduate study and research at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld during the winter of 1930 to the spring of 1931. From the spring through the summer of 1931, he was at Cambridge University. Upon return to the United States, he joined the faculty of MIT.[1] [2] Widely considered to be the father of operations research (OR) in the U.S., Philip Morse organized the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG), later ORG, for the U.S. Navy early in 1942, after the US had entered World War II and was faced with the problem of Nazi German U-boat attacks on transatlantic shipping. "That Morse’s group was an important factor in winning the war is fairly obvious to everyone who knows anything about the inside of the war," wrote historian John Burchard. Dr. Morse co-authored Methods of Operations Research, the first OR textbook in the U.S., with George E. Kimball based on the Navy work. In 1946, he was a recipient of the Presidential Medal for Merit for his work during the war. In 1949 he was named the first Research Director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), an organization founded to conduct studies for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he served a year and a half before returning to MIT in the summer of 1950. Dr. Morse’s life overflowed with contributions to the development of OR. He was a member of a National Research Council committee dedicated to bringing OR into civilian life, and was a prime mover behind the creation of the Operations Research Society of America in 1952. He launched MIT’s Operations Research Center in 1956, directing it until 1968, and awarding the first Ph.D. in OR in the U.S. (to John Little). Dr. Morse gave the opening address at the 1957 organizing meeting of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). In 1959 he chaired the first NATO advisory panel on OR. His writings include the influential books Queues, Inventories, and Maintenance and Library Effectiveness. He received ORSA’s Lanchester Prize in 1968 for the latter book. Dr. Morse has also conducted distinguished careers in physics and in scientific administration. Examples of his contributions in physics are the textbooks Quantum Mechanics (with Edward Condon), Methods of Theoretical Physics (with Herman Feshbach), Vibration and Sound, Theoretical Acoustics, and Thermal Physics. His administrative talents were applied in roles as co-founder of the MIT Acoustics Laboratory, first director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, founder and first director of the MIT Computation Center, and board member of the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analyses. He chaired the advisory committee that supervised preparation of Handbook of Mathematical Functions, with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables. In addition, he served as president of the American Physical Society, president of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and board chair of the American Institute of Physics. In 1973 the ASA awarded him the Gold Medal, its highest award, for his work on vibration.
References
- Morse, Philip M. In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977.
- Intl. Trans. in Op. Res. 10 (2003) 307–309: IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame: Philip McCord Morse
Notes
- ^ Philip M. Morse In at the Beginnings: A Physicists Life (MIT Press, second printing 1978) p. 100.
- ^ Paul Kirkpatrick Address of Recommendation by Professor Paul Kirkpatrick, Chairman of the Committee on Awards, American Journal of Physics 17 (5) 312-314 (1949). In this article, the following students of Arnold Sommerfeld are mentioned: William V. Houston, Karl Bechert, Otto Scherzer, Otto Laporte, Linus Pauling, Carl Eckart, Gregor Wentzel, Peter Debye, and Philip M. Morse.
