THE FORGOTTEN REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS IN SCIENCES OF MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Identification and detailed characteristics of schools, currents or directions of research inthe history of development of organizational thought in sciences of management is based on thehistorical approach. An ordering of them usually takes into account the period of their establishmentand the names of researchers who are acknowledged to be founders-pioneers and/or leadingrepresentatives. In Polish literature, many authors advocate the conception of distinguishing aclassical school (scientific management, administrative management) with its division into theindustrial current – Industrial Engineering and the universalist approach, as well as the current ofhuman relations – referred to as the humanizing one. They are quite often accompanied by a lesselaborate description of a relevant school of mathematics (quantitative, operational studies) as anindependent approach or in the context of a systemic school, as well as by a list of the names of itsrepresentatives, yet their biographies are presented decidedly more rarely, including variousprofessional and personal accomplishments.The aim of the article is to try to introduce biographies of representatives of themathematical school into the literature of the subject dealing with sciences of management on apermanent basis, ones which so far have been dispersed in publications of a number of differentdisciplines and – in doing so – at least to partially fill in the void in this area. Accordingly, on thebasis of the applied non-reactive method of desk research, which was elaborated for the needs of thepresent work, the literature of the subject was reviewed and a fair amount of contextual informationwas obtained as a result. To elaborate the professional and private biographies of the mainrepresentatives of the mathematical school a study of foreign literature and presentations of theprofiles of selected representatives – candidates nominated for Nobel Prizes – were used primarily.The publication, founded on the subjective choice made by its authors contains the biographies ofthe following scientists: Leonid W. Kantorovich, Patrick Blackett, John D. Bernal, Robert S.McNamara and Harold W. Kuhn.