Ailsa Land

Ailsa Land (1927 to 2021) was a British operational researcher and economist who became the first woman professor of operational research in Britain. Born Ailsa Dicken in West Bromwich, she spent part of her childhood in Canada during the Second World War, then studied economics at the London School of Economics, took her doctorate there in 1956 with a dissertation applying linear programming to the transport of coal, and stayed at the school for the rest of her career. With Alison Doig she devised, in 1960, the branch and bound method for optimization problems with integer variables, work first carried out for British Petroleum without access to a computer, and it remains the most common way to solve many hard discrete optimization problems. She also wrote on the travelling salesman problem, shortest path algorithms and quadratic programming, and published Fortran codes for mathematical programming. She was awarded the EURO Gold Medal after her death in 2021.