Optimal

I think of myself as a “numbers wallah”^*, a guy who deals with problems by turning them into maths of various kinds. During the last 35 years, my kind of maths has mostly been statistics mixed with quantitative genetics, which is a very useful combination. But maths has been present in my life for longer, at least since high school.

Thirty six years ago I was sitting an Optimization course, as part of my forestry degree (sporting longer and darker hair, equally nerdy, though). Linear programming, dynamic programming and simulation, that kind of stuff. I was fascinated by the subject and was going to do my undergraduate thesis in some forest transportation problem. But then came tree breeding and changed the direction of my life (thanks, Roberto!).

Last week, I was talking with a colleague visiting from Chile, and we were talking about a harvesting optimization problem with spatial constraints. I mean, he was doing all the work, I was just throwing opinions about his objective function… And I remembered how much I liked this type of problems. Together with working with forest mensuration students and linking all this work to financial evaluations, I have been rediscovering parts of forestry work that I haven’t touched in a long time and that made me feel excited. Now I am starting to read, a little bit, about optimization and thinking of how to connect it to the rest of my work.

^*In the same way there are chaiwallahs or dabbawallahs.