Ward Whitt (born January 29, 1942) is an American professor ofoperations research and management sciences. He is a professor emeritus of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department ofColumbia University. His research focuses onqueueing theory, performance analysis,stochastic models of telecommunication systems, andnumerical transform inversion. He is recognized for his contributions to the understanding and analyses of complex queues and queuing networks, which led to advances in the telecommunications system.^[1]

Whitt was born inBozeman, Montana in 1942.^[2] He received an A.B. in Mathematics fromDartmouth in 1964, and in 1969 completed a Ph.D. in operations research fromCornell under the supervision ofDonald Lee Iglehart.^[3] His doctoral thesis,Weak Convergence Theorems for Queues in Heavy Traffic, paved the path for his future research.^[4] Whitt joined the operations research faculty atStanford before moving toYale in 1969. From 1977–2002, he worked inBell Labs and thenAT&T Labs. Since 2002, he has been a full professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia.^[5] He was appointed Wai T. Chang Professor in 2007,^[6] and is currently Professor Emeritus.^[7]

Whitt received numerous accolades for his seminal contributions tooperations research. He holds a number of telecommunications-related patents.^[8] He has been on the editorial boards of major management science journals includingOperations Research. He is a member ofInstitute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) andInstitute of Mathematical Statistics. He has also been a member and committee chair in theNational Academy of Engineering. From 1999 to 2001, Whitt has been on the INFORMS prize committee.^[9]

• 2003 INFORMSFrederick W. Lanchester Prize
• 2002 Inaugural INFORMS Fellow^[10]
• 2001John von Neumann Theory Prize
• 2001 Harold Larnder Prize
• 1997 AT&T Fellow
• 1996National Academy of Engineering Member

Books

• Whitt, Ward (2002).Stochastic-Process Limits. Springer Series in Operations Research and Financial Engineering. Springer-Verlag.doi:10.1007/b97479.ISBN 978-0-387-95358-8.

Articles

• — (1980)."Some Useful Functions for Functional Limit Theorems".Mathematics of Operations Research.5 (1):67–85.doi:10.1287/moor.5.1.67.
• — (1983)."The Queueing Network Analyzer".The Bell System Technical Journal.62 (9):2779–2815.doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1983.tb03204.x.
• Fendick, Kerry; Whitt, Ward (2024)."On Gaussian Markov processes and Polya processes".Operations Research Letters.52.doi:10.1016/j.orl.2023.107062.

• Home Page
• Ward Whitt at theMathematics Genealogy Project
• Ward Whitt publications indexed byGoogle Scholar

• 1942 births
• Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
• Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
• Dartmouth College alumni
• Cornell University College of Engineering alumni
• Columbia University faculty
• Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty
• Living people
• American probability theorists
• John von Neumann Theory Prize winners
• 20th-century American mathematicians
• 21st-century American mathematicians

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