1995 ACCOUNTING HALL FAME INDUCTION: WILLIAM W. COOPER

Abstract

He has been a catalyst of change on a world-wide basis for more than 50 years: in his research, with his inspired teaching, as an editor for many periodicals, and as a consultant to both private, governmental and public institutions. A prodigious author, his writings often focused on quantitative and creative approaches to management. Equally important have been his contributions to management education as noted in Ford and Carnegie Foundation reports. Working with others, he has authored 17 books and over 450 articles including ones with Hall of Fame members Robert Trueblood, Eric Kohler and Yuji Ijiri. With his long-time collaborator, the mathematician Abraham Charnes, he was known everywhere as Mr. Linear Programming, partly because, together, they developed whole new areas of use and research such as goal programming, constrained programming, and more recently, data envelopment analysis. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, his father was a bookkeeper and later a distributor for Annheuser-Busch. When he was three years old, the family moved to Chicago where his father owned a chain of gasoline stations that he lost in the Great Depression. He continued in high school only until the end of his sophomore year. With his father in ill health and no family revenue, he had to work at whatever he could find. This included everything from professional boxing to spotting pins in bowling alleys and caddying at golf courses. While hitchhiking to a golf course one day, he met Hall of Fame member Eric Kohler, who thereafter became his life-long mentor. This included a loan of funds which enabled him to start a nondegree track at the University of Chicago. He quickly learned to like the academic atmosphere and soon took the college entrance examinations, intending to become a physical chemist because that seemed to offer the best chance of a job. At about this time, Kohler, then a principal at Arthur Andersen, asked him to look over the mathematics used in a patent infringement suit in which Andersen had been retained by the defendant. He found errors in the mathematics used by the plaintiff's engineers and Andersen hired him full-time in the summer and part-time during the school year. This awakened his interest in accounting, and so he changed his major from chemistry to economics at the University of Chicago, and Kohler helped him to learn accounting. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in economics in 1938. Kohler had by then left Andersen and assumed the position of Controller for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Kohler brought him to the TVA to head up work on procedural auditing (what would now be called performance auditing) as well as to advise Kohler on the mathematics of cost allocation and other disputed matters in which the TVA was involved. This included helping Kohler to prepare testimony on these and other matters to be investigated by a Joint House-Senate Investigation Committee. Most of the work was completed by mid-1940 so he left to become a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University where he had been awarded a doctoral fellowship in the School of Business. After passing his prelims in 1942, he again left academia to join the Division of Statistical Standards at the U.S. Bureau of Budget (now the OMB) where, as part of the U.S. war effort, he was placed in charge of coordinating all of the Federal Government's accounting and accounting-related statistics programs. …