The leading journal for theoretical work in operations research, Mathematics of Operations Research, is marking its 50th anniversary in 2026. As part of its celebration of reaching this milestone, the journal has published a list of its 50 most influential papers, citing one paper from each calendar year since 1976.

Cover image of the 2026 Journal of Mathematics of Operations Research

Faculty and alumni of Cornell are well-represented on the list, with most coming from the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. The eleven papers below come from five decades and have at least one Cornell-affiliated author (where the non-Cornell co-authors are indicated as well for each reference).

  • 1977 New Finite Pivoting Rules for the Simplex Method, faculty member Robert Bland.
  • 1978 Best Algorithms for Approximating the Maximum of a Submodular Set Function, faculty member George Nemhauser (with co-author L.A. Wolsey).
  • 1979 Mathematical Properties of the Banzhaf Power Index, Ph.D. alumnus (operations research) Pradeep Dubey (with co-author L.S. Shapley).
  • 1987 Minkowski’s Convex Body Theorem and Integer Programming, Ph.D. alumnus (operations research) Ravindran Kannan.
  • 1993 On Adaptive-Step Primal-Dual Interior-Point Algorithms for Linear Programming, faculty member Michael Todd (with co-authors S. Mizuno and Y. Ye).
  • 1995 Fast Approximation Algorithms for Fractional Packing and Covering Problems, faculty members David Shmoys and Éva Tardos (with co-author S.A. Plotkin).
  • 1997 Self-Scaled Barriers and Interior-Point Methods for Convex Programming, faculty member Michael Todd (with co-author Y.E. Nesterov).
  • 2002 The Complexity of Decentralized Control of Markov Decision Processes, Ph.D. alumnus (computer science) Neil Immerman (with co-authors D.S. Bernstein, R. Givan, and S. Zilberstein).
  • 2006 Integer Polynomial Optimization in Fixed Dimension, Ph.D. alumnus (applied mathematics) Jesús De Loera (with co-authors R. Hemmecke, M. Köppe, and R. Weismantel).
  • 2009 Minimal Valid Inequalities for Integer Constraints, Ph.D. alumnus (operations research) Gerard Cornuéjols (with co-author V. Borozan).
  • 2018 Error Bounds, Quadratic Growth, and Linear Convergence of Proximal Methods, Ph.D. alumnus (operations research) Dima Drusvyatskiy and faculty member Adrian Lewis.