Richard Robert Weber
Richard
Weber retired in 2017, having been Churchill
Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research (1994-2017). He is a Fellow of Queens'
College.
He started at Cambridge as a mathematics undergraduate in 1971, proceeding subsequently to
Part III
(Mayhew Prize),
and a Ph.D. in the
Engineering Department,
where, under the supervision of Peter Nash, his dissertation was titled Multi-Server Stochastic Scheduling. It concerned some practical problems of reservoir management and coal mining, and established the optimality of
the least-hazard rate policy for
Lady's Nylon Stocking Problem
(posed by D. R. Cox. in 1959), the optimal of join-shortest queue routing, and optimality of
LEPT and SEPT for problems of minimizing expected makespan and flowtime when
scheduling jobs of stochastic processing requirements on parallel processors.
His first jobs were as a Research Fellow
at Queens' College (1977-78), and Assistant Lecturer in the
C.U. Engineering
Department (1978-94). He served in that department for 15 years, becoming
Reader in Management Science, and was much involved in the founding days
of the Cambridge Judge
Business School. He came to the
Statistical Laboratory in the
Department of Pure Mathematics and
Mathematical Statistics in 1994 to succeed Peter Whittle as Churchill Professor. He has served
in the Statistical Laboratory as
Director 2000-2009 and at Queens' College
he has been Tutor, Graduate Tutor, Director of Studies and Vice President (1995-2007).
His research interests, papers and books range over the fields of applied probabilitiy, optimization, statistics,
economics, and computer science.
He has written on problems in stochastic
scheduling, Gittins index,
queueing theory, large deviations, stochastic
networks, optimization, rendezvous search games, micro economics of
communications pricing, mechanism design, online bin packing, manufacturing
systems, and stochastic dynamic programming.
He has served at various times on the editorial boards
of Applied Probability, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations
Research, Management Science, Probability in the Engineering and
Informational Sciences, and Naval Research Logistics. He has supervised ten Ph.D. students.
He has written 25 of his papers in collaboration with
Costas Courcoubetis,
who he met when in 1983 he was on sabbatical at EECS Berkeley. They
have spent many happy and productive summer weeks together, for many years at
AT&T Bell Laboratories, and then
in Greece.
On the sum-of-squares algorithm for bin packing,
(co-authored with J. Csirik, D. S. Johnson, C. Kenyon, J. B. Orlin) was awarded
the INFORMS Computing Society Prize for the best publication on the interface of Operations Research and Computer Science 2007.
He has an interest in magic and conjuring and, after once writing an exam question based on the game, he appeared on ITV's Who
Wants to be a MIllionaire in October 2003.
Further dates are here.