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

Abstract

Identification and detailed characteristics of schools, currents or directions of research in
the history of development of organizational thought in sciences of management is based on the
historical approach. An ordering of them usually takes into account the period of their establishment
and the names of researchers who are acknowledged to be founders-pioneers and/or leading
representatives. In Polish literature, many authors advocate the conception of distinguishing a
classical school (scientific management, administrative management) with its division into the
industrial current – Industrial Engineering and the universalist approach, as well as the current of
human relations – referred to as the humanizing one. They are quite often accompanied by a less
elaborate description of a relevant school of mathematics (quantitative, operational studies) as an
independent approach or in the context of a systemic school, as well as by a list of the names of its
representatives, yet their biographies are presented decidedly more rarely, including various
professional and personal accomplishments.
The aim of the article is to try to introduce biographies of representatives of the
mathematical school into the literature of the subject dealing with sciences of management on a
permanent basis, ones which so far have been dispersed in publications of a number of different
disciplines and – in doing so – at least to partially fill in the void in this area. Accordingly, on the
basis of the applied non-reactive method of desk research, which was elaborated for the needs of the
present work, the literature of the subject was reviewed and a fair amount of contextual information
was obtained as a result. To elaborate the professional and private biographies of the main
representatives of the mathematical school a study of foreign literature and presentations of the
profiles 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 of
the following scientists: Leonid W. Kantorovich, Patrick Blackett, John D. Bernal, Robert S.
McNamara and Harold W. Kuhn.