[Todos] Vice president of IFORS

[fabio vicentini]

 Buenos Aires, October 2, 2012

Dear IFORS members:

 The longer I have lived, the more I have come to suspect solemnity and to
see in it – not always, but frequently – a cloak of a humbug (Bertrand
Russell)

 When I was a child I looked up to grown-up people with awe - I was
impressed by their serious countenance. My mother took me to church where
monsignor Tartuffe told me that God is three but only one contradicting the
arithmetic I was being taught in primary school. Just out of the secondary
school, I entered college where I heard professor Pangloss defining a real
number by a Dedekind cut. I did not grasp the notion then, and turning to
my schoolmates for help, they made me feel stupid because they said it was
obvious. Somewhere along the path of my life I commenced smelling a rat:
are my fellow countrymen pretenders? Now I am a grown-up fellow myself, and
I have learnt how to impress people with my seriousness: I just put on a
solemn face.

 I spent 30 years working as an operations research practitioner in a dozen
dirty, bad smelling factories, and I never met there a colleague because he
is doing basic research in the Academy committed to the project of
extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, and when he is done he will write a
paper and send it to a peer-reviewed journal.

Then it occurred in 1995 that I landed up in the Academy myself where I
found that my colleagues were teaching Operations Research as it stood in
1950. Hence I asked the math chairman to allow me to update the OR
contents. And so it was, I changed the subject over to Combinatorial
Optimization, and Doktor Hugo Scolnik and his wife Doktorin Irene Loiseau -
who were teaching the old stuff - returned to the Computer Science dept
where they belong.

Lo and behold! Ten years passed by, and Mrs Loiseau was lecturing my
syllabus under the name of Algorithms III in the Computer Science dept. The
time was now ripe to supplant old fool Fabio. Indeed Dr Scolnik performed a
sleight of hand and I was violently vanished from the math dept. I
submitted the case to professor Jorge Aliaga - dean of the school - who
rejected my complaint because Dr Scolnik is an honorable vice president of
IFORS.

 Fabio Vicentini

OR Practitioner
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