William W. Cooper

William Wager Cooper (July 23, 1914 – June 20, 2012) was an American operations researcher, known as a father of management science and as "Mr. Linear Programming". He was the founding president of The Institute of Management Sciences, founding editor-in-chief of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University), founding dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs (now the Heinz College) at CMU, the former Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University, and the Foster Parker Professor Emeritus of Management, Finance and Accounting at the University of Texas at Austin.

William Wager Cooper was born on July 23, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. He grew up in Chicago, where his father (a former bookkeeper) owned several gasoline stations that closed in the Great Depression. Cooper, in his second year of high school, dropped out to help support his family. He worked in a bowling alley, on a golf course, and as a professional boxer;. As a boxer, he won 58 bouts, lost three, and drew two. While commuting to the golf course, he met Eric Kohler, a professor at Northwestern University, who pushed him to go back to school and bankrolled his entry to the University of Chicago. At Chicago, he began studying physical chemistry but was inspired by his work for Kohler on a legal case to switch to economics, graduating with a B.A. and Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1938.

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