John DC Little ’48, Ph.D. ’55, professor emeritus at the MIT Institute, an inventor whose work had a major impact on operations research and marketing, died on September 27 at the age of 96. He joined MIT as an undergraduate in 1945 and served the Institute community for nearly 80 years, serving on the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management starting in 1962.
Little’s career has been marked by innovative computing research, an interdisciplinary and broad research agenda, and research that is both theoretically robust and of practical use to business managers. Mr. Little has a strong commitment to supporting and mentoring others within the Institute and has been instrumental in helping to form professional associations in his field, such as the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). played a role.
He is best known for formulating “Little’s Law,” a concept applied to operations research that generalizes queue dynamics. The theorem, expressed as L = λW, roughly states that the number of customers or other people waiting in line is equal to the product of the arrival rate and the average time spent in the system. The results can be applied to many systems, from manufacturing to healthcare to customer service, and are especially useful for quantifying and remediating business bottlenecks.
Although he is rarely credited with contributing to the development of both operations research and marketing science, he has made many advances since the 1960s. Innovations in computer modeling were used to analyze a wide range of marketing issues, from customer behavior and brand loyalty to corporate-level decision-making, often regarding advertising deployment strategies. Little’s research methodology has evolved to incorporate new data streams increasingly made available through information technology, such as purchase information derived from barcodes.
“John Little was a mentor and friend to many of us both at MIT and beyond,” said Georgia Perakis, MIT Sloan’s John C. Interim Director III. “He was also the first doctoral student in the field of operations research, a founder of MIT Sloan’s Marketing Group, and a pioneer in his research, including Little’s Law, published in 1961. MIT Many of us at Sloan have been able to follow in John’s footsteps and learn from his research and leadership both at the school and in many professional organizations, including the INFORMS Association, of which he served as its first president. I am very fortunate and grateful to have known and learned from John.”
Little’s longtime colleagues in MIT Sloan’s marketing group had a similar opinion.
“John was a true academic giant, conducting pioneering research in queuing, optimization, decision science, and marketing science,” said Steven, post-tenured administrator of the Abraham J. Siegel Professor at MIT Sloan. Graves said. “He was also an outstanding academic leader and was highly influential in shaping and strengthening the professional societies of operations research and marketing science. He was also a great mentor and colleague, and always He was caring, thoughtful, wise, and had a New England sense of humor.”
John Dutton Conant Little was born in Boston and raised in Andover, Massachusetts. At MIT, he majored in physics and edited the campus humor magazine. After graduation, he worked at General Electric, where he met his future wife, Dr. Elizabeth Alden (’54). Both became doctoral students in physics at MIT in 1951.
Alden studied ferroelectric materials that exhibit complex properties of polarization and collaborated with Professor Arthur R. von Hippel on a paper titled “Dynamic Behavior of Domain Walls in Barium Titanate.” Mr. Little, on the advice of Professor Philip Morse, used MIT’s famous Whirlwind I computer to write his thesis. His paper, entitled “Use of Storage Water in Hydroelectric Power Systems,” modeled an approach to optimally and cost-effectively distribute water stored in dams. This is a paper in both physics and operations research, and is believed to be the first paper ever awarded in operations research.
Little then served in the U.S. Army and spent five years as a faculty member at what is now Case Western Reserve University, returning to the Institute in 1962 as an associate professor of operations research and management at MIT Sloan. Having worked in a field at the cutting edge of using computing to address operational problems, Little began applying computer modeling to marketing problems. His research included models of consumer choice and promotional spending.
Little has published dozens of academic papers spanning operations research and marketing, and co-edited the 1974 book, The Marketing Information Revolution, published by Harvard Business School Press, with Robert C. Blattberg and Rashi Glaser. He is an academic in a wide range of fields and has also published several studies on traffic light and traffic flow optimization.
Still, in addition to Little’s Law, some of his major research came from marketing and management research. In an influential 1970 paper published in Management Science, Little outlined the specifications that a good data-driven management model should have and that business leaders should be provided with the tools to fully understand it. I emphasized one thing.
In a 1979 Operations Research paper, Little described the elements needed to develop a robust model of a company’s advertising spending, including the geographic distribution of spending and a company’s spending over time. And in a 1983 paper with Peter Guadagni published in Marketing Science, Little used the emergence of consumer product scanner data to build powerful models of consumer behavior and brand loyalty. However, the model remains influential.
Although these topics may be separate, Little always sought to explain the dynamics at play in each case. As an academic, he “had the vision to recognize marketing as a source of interesting and relevant untapped opportunities for OR (operations research) and management science,” said Little’s MIT colleagues John Hauser and Glenn.・Urban writes about him in the biographical chapter. John DC Little” contributed to the book “Profiles in Operations Research” published in 2011. IT, Hauser, and Urban detail the lasting contributions these and other papers have made.
By 1967, Little co-founded Management Decisions Systems, a company that modeled marketing problems for major corporations. It was later acquired by Information Resources, Inc., of which Little was a director.
In 1989, Little was named Institute Professor, the highest honor for a professor at MIT. He previously served as director of the MIT Operations Research Center. At MIT Sloan, he is the former head of the management sciences and behavioral and policy sciences.
Because of his productivity as a scholar, Little also served as a valuable mentor to many people, while also hosting an annual Thanksgiving dinner in his family home outside Boston for faculty and students based overseas. did. He also took pride in encouraging women to enter management and academia. To name just a few, he was the chair professor of the late Asha Seth Kapadia SM ’65, one of Sloan’s first international and female students. She studied queuing theory and later served as a professor at the University of Texas Public Schools for many years. health.
Additionally, current MIT Sloan Professor Juanjuan Zhang credits Little with sparking his interest in the field. Currently, Zhang is the John DC Little Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan.
“John was an extraordinary person,” Chan said. “His foundational work transformed marketing from an art to an art to science to engineering, a process that ordinary people can follow to succeed. He democratized marketing.”
Little’s presence at MIT as an innovative, interdisciplinary scholar and someone who encouraged others to pursue their own research is fundamental to his memory at MIT.
“John was a pioneer in operations research at MIT and is widely known for Little’s Law, but he did much more than that in marketing science,” said MIT Sloan Dean Emeritus and David Austin Professor. said Urban, professor emeritus of marketing. “His analytical work on adaptive advertising created the field of operations research modeling in marketing and did fundamental work on marketing response. He believed that the models were not only theoretically powerful, but also It remained true to MIT’s philosophy of “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”). Personally, John hired me as an assistant professor in 1966 and supported my research at MIT for the next 55 years. I am grateful to him and saddened by the loss of a friend and mentor. ”
Hauser, the Kirin Marketing Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School, added: “John made significant contributions to many fields, from operations to management science to the founding of marketing science. More importantly, he mentored countless faculty and students, and with integrity and resourcefulness. He was a unique colleague who led by example. I and many others owe a debt to John for our love of operations research and marketing science.”
In recognition of his scholarship, Little was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The American Marketing Association awarded Little the Charles Perlin Award for Contributions to the Practice of Marketing Research in 1979 and the Paul D. Converse Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1992. Little was the first president of INFORMS to receive this award. He received the George E. Kimball Medal. Mr. Little also served as president of the Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and the Operations Research Association of America (ORSA).
An avid jogger, biker, and seafood chef, Little was devoted to his family. He was predeceased by his wife, Elizabeth, and two sisters, Margaret and Frances. Few of his children Jack, Sarah, Thomas and Ruel survive. eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Memorial arrangements have been entrusted to Dee Funeral Home in Concord, Massachusetts.
