models, improve decisions, and ultimately add value to institutions and individuals. The philosophical underpinnings of the book are that real world problems are usually complex and often will defined; they do not come with labels, meaning that they are not necessarily regression problems or optimization problems. The only objective reality is data, which itself may be incomplete and of questionable quality, and the role of models is to facilitate the solution of real world problems. Problems and data play a leading role in this book, while models play an essential but supporting role. This is in contrast with the vast majority of books and classes available today, in which methods play the leading role. Dimitris Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research and the co-director of the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, recipient of numerous research awards and co-founder of six Analytics companies. Allison K. O'Hair is a Lecturer in Operations, Information and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She has a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT, and is a former Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. William R. Pulleyblank is Professor of Operations Research at the United States Military Academy, West Point. Previously he was Vice President of Business Optimization in IBM and before that led the BlueGene supercomputing project in IBM Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on a broad range of business and government advisory boards.

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