Saul Gass, Operations Research Pioneer [1926-2013]

At the EURO 2012 conference in Vilnius there was a session to commemorate the European OR pioneers that had been included in Profiles in Operations Research: pioneers and Innovators (2011), edited by Saul Gass and Arjang Assad. Saul himself was to give a paper on Kantorovich, the Russian inventor of linear programming. A few weeks before the conference, Saul had to cry off because the cancer, which was to take his life soon after his 87th birthday, had been diagnosed. His talk was given on his behalf. He died on March 17, 2013 in his home in Potomac, Maryland. In the obituaries and eulogies that followed his death, his knowledge, wisdom, humour and humanity were highlighted, with the acknowledgement that his passing is a huge loss to the OR community. Saul Irving Gass, an esteemed operational researcher, was born on February 28, 1926 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to Russian parents – they had emigrated as teenagers around 1914 – and graduated in 1943 from high school. Soon after his 18th birthday, Saul was inducted into the Army (March 17, 1944) at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and completed a year of engineering at Northeastern University. He trained as a machine gunner with the 65th Infantry Division, leaving from New York in January 1945 for Le Havre, before, as part of General Patton’s Third Army, moving into action on March 17, 1945, crossing through southern Germany and into Austria. Saul’s unit stopped at the west bank of the Enns River, where they were on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, making them the US Army unit that had gone furthest east. After his discharge on May 23, 1946, Saul married Trudy Candler, whose family had moved to Los Angeles, on June 30, 1946 and they then returned to Boston to live with his parents. Ronald