I just finished my presentation to business undergraduate students and, from what I could tell by looking at them, I think it was successful. Of course the real test will be whether someone stops by my office saying “I love OR! Can I work with you?”. I want to thank our vice dean for this opportunity and I am looking forward to doing it again next year.

I closed the presentation with a little “quiz” based on a very nice paper by Brown, Klein, Rosenthal and Washburn entitled Steaming on Convex Hulls. Here’s how it goes (you can open the image on a new window to make it larger):

An aircraft carrier can run with 2 or 4 engines online. The graph below shows gallons of gasoline used per hour versus possible speeds for each engine configuration. How would you run the ship to cover 100 miles in 4 hours?

According to the article, the Navy spends over 1 billion dollars a year on surface combatants alone. An officer who became a ship commander after graduating from the academy was smart enough to solve the above problem the right way. His ship was saving so much fuel that it had to be inspected under the suspicion that it was violating safety regulations. But we all know it wasn’t. It was just a case of using analytical techniques to make better decisions.