Thread by @miketrick

Georgia Tech Professor John Bartholdi has passed away. He was my advisor, my mentor, and my friend. His passing leaves a terrible hole, but I am incredibly grateful for the impact he has had on me both professionally and personally. @GeorgiaTechISyE #orms

@GeorgiaTechISyE On the professional side, he, Craig Tovey and I spent a fantastic few years writing papers that would become a foundation for the field of computational social choice. After sitting dormant (citation-wise) for fifteen years (from 1990-2005), the impact of those papers exploded.

@GeorgiaTechISyE There is no one who was more creative in approaches to problems. He was never satisfied with just formulating a problem as an integer program. He always found something very clever and interesting in problems. (3/n)

@GeorgiaTechISyE My favorite was his work on space-filling curves. Originally based on a need to find a low-technology routing system for a "Meals on Wheels" operation, John found all sorts of ways that these curves could quickly find good solutions to problems. www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jjb/research/…

@GeorgiaTechISyE I also love his work with Don Eisenstein (a PhD student contemporary of mine, now at Chicago), first on self-balancing production lines, a more recently on a very cool, simple way to balance buses and other transportation systems (5/n) www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jjb/papers/Ba…

@GeorgiaTechISyE Going through his paper list (scholar.google.com/citations?user…) reminded me of his paper (with Ratliff and Orlin) on circular one matrices. Scarcely a year goes by without having some part of my research run into circular-one matrices. (6/n)

@GeorgiaTechISyE It was papers like this that convinced me to do work in #orms (7/n) pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.128…

@GeorgiaTechISyE His entire publication record consists of delights and surprises. He could make warehousing methods fascinating, and show how insect decision making and production systems were related. (8/n)

@GeorgiaTechISyE He taught me to keep my mind open to #orms no matter what I was doing, and that the most valuable thing I could do is to read widely. One never knew where the next inspiration would come from! (9/n)

@GeorgiaTechISyE He introduced me to the Patrick O'Brian Aubry and Maturin series, a set of books that influenced me more than anything else I have ever read. Because of John (and O'Brian), I have gone sailing, got certified as a scuba diver, and look at nature in far different ways. (10/n)

@GeorgiaTechISyE John was my favorite person to see at #orms conferences, though, for various reasons, those meetings were rare recently. Every meeting was a joy, and an intellectual charge. I felt better informed and more creative whenever we talked. (11/n)

@GeorgiaTechISyE I am going to miss John Bartholdi very much, but my life is incomparably better for having known and worked with him. (12/12)

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