Les Servi

My book on analysis of critical infrastructure with Springer Nature is out: read.amazon.com/sample/3032112… I am starting to give talks about the book

Honored to be co-recipient of @INFORMS 2025 George E. Kimball Medal—the society’s highest service award. May it inspire others to look beyond the transactional and rebuild social capital. informs.org/News-Room/INFO…

Just received my COVID vaccine. Thanks @cvspharmacy and @maura_healey

@asdf_101 @PhysInHistory Mathematics explains the order others may not see. It is hard to underestimate the value of the such clarity.

@PhysInHistory mathematics is the silent choreographer of existence .. turning cosmic chaos into a dance we can count on reality’s operating system runs on numbers

Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics. Once that germ of rationality and order exists to turn a chaos into a cosmos, then so does mathematics. There could not be a non-mathematical Universe containing living observers. -- John D. Barrow

Overdue EO related to OR signed today ⁦@INFORMS⁩ ⁦@morsanalytics⁩

My first experiment with grok sought to capture my thoughts when I hear of people using excel to make serious subtle data rich complex decisions rather than viewing analytics as a force multiplier.

@morsanalytics I feel honored to be chosen and grateful to all the @morsanalytics volunteers, members, and staff that make this meaningful and worthwhile. Thanks also to @MITREcorp for supporting me at this over the years

We are honored to welcome Dr. Les Servi and LTC (Ret.) Herman J. Orgeron as the newly-elected MORS Fellows! Join us in celebrating their achievements and commitment to advancing the discipline! Learn more about the MORS Fellows program here: loom.ly/-v6fu38

@AmericanAir Not listed because @AmericanAir stopped allowing people to join list up to the time the doors closed You are purposely allowing a plane to fly with an open seat and a tired customer who wants that seat Bad for customers, shareholders and employees trying to defend policy

@lds123 Aw, man! We're sorry to know you weren't able to get listed. Once available you can make your standby request beginning 24 hours and up to 45 minutes before departure.

Was a lot of fun to do: INFORMS Resoundingly Human is a great series

From Pearl Harbor to European football to slicing salami, Les Servi @lds123, Chief Scientist Cyber Operations Research at The MITRE Corporation (@MITREcorp), shares interesting (and fun!) insight on the role of #operationsresearch in #nationalsecurity. ▶️ bit.ly/3YECBsS

@denizbesik @Supernetworks @BrownUniversity @miketrick She was a great professor who first introduced me to OR via the H&L book.

My @brownuniversity PhD advisor Stella Dafermos passed away on April 5, 1990 - hard to believe it has been 34 years. I wrote this tribute to her on the 30th anniversary of her passing and the post even mentions @miketrick and @denizbesik annanagurney.blogspot.com/2020/04/markin… It includes my academic genealogy going back to Maxwell, Newton & Galileo. The academic tree, expanded with my PhD students and framed, hangs in my office.

@ScottAdamsSays If you predict a dice roll will probably be more than ‘1’ but it turns out to be ‘1’ that doesn’t mean odds don’t apply to you. Maybe you were unlikely. Maybe you should roll again. Maybe rolling different die would help. Maybe it will not help.

I live my life as if the odds don’t apply to me for anything related to success. And sure enough, my life unfolded as if that were true. Feels like magic, but that’s probably an illusion caused by me consistently not understanding the true odds of things. For example, I’m not a great artist, and I’m usually not the funniest person in any crowded room. So, for years, I incorrectly assumed I did not have the skill to be a professional cartoonist. If I had been better at calculating my odds, I would have understood that being good-but-not-great at several complementary skills made my odds of success surprisingly good. I could give you a dozen more examples where my common sense estimation of the odds was way off. For example, I didn’t know that simply showing up for work and doing what I said I would do could put me in the top 10% of performers. But it did. I also believed promotions would be solely based on performance, but they weren’t. I was very bad at estimating the odds of things. Eventually, I figured out a mental hack (a reframe) for avoiding being “trapped by the odds”: I told myself the odds didn’t apply to me. It felt good to think of it that way, but what it really meant was that I could not accurately predict my own future. But what I COULD do was steadily acquire a suite of complementary skills that would fit a lot of different opportunities and then try a bunch of things that wouldn’t kill me if they failed. 90% of the things I have tried in life have failed. So I tried fifty things that didn’t kill me and got five solid wins. Summary: Sometimes your odds are bad and sometimes you are bad at estimating the odds.

@Anthony_Bonato @Noahpinion It is important to never underestimate the power of differential equations. Some would say analytics are a force multiplier.

It's peak travel season again, so remember to hide your differential equations.

@nntaleb Minimal entropy for maximum taste principle extends beyond food to presentations, art, arguments, ….

ENTROPY DU JOUR The ideal Mediterranean food is minimum entropy for maximal taste, that is, the smallest number of (fresh) ingredients possible, usually 3-6. Salad bars are a modern abomination. The Poké bowl had ~20 ingredients (salad +rice "base", 4 "protein", 5 "mixed ins", 5 toppings, 2 sprinkles, sauce). I had no memory of the taste.

No (human) driver #inform2023

Embracing force multiplying analytics at #inform2023

@Supernetworks @BrownUniversity @Harvard Thanks for coming to talk. Les

Super excited about the plenary talk of @lds123 on #orms and #nationalsecurity. Dr. Les Servi has @brownuniversity degrees in Applied Math and a PhD from @harvard. We overlapped at Brown for a few years. #mitre

Looking forward to giving my upcoming keynote “Operations Research and National Security” at @INFORMS Annual meeting, #informs2023 and grateful to @MITREcorp for their support with this. #servi" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">meetings.informs.org/wordpress/phoe…

Daryl J Daley: friend; collaborator of many papers while being 10k miles apart; wrote the Point Processes book; active with ⁦@INFORMS⁩ APS and Applied Probability Trust; musician, recently passed away. He will be missed. youtube.com/watch?v=uccmN1…

Birthday cake celebration of Army cut by the youngest and oldest member of USMA at West Point during ⁦@morsanalytics⁩ 91st Symposium.