Richard Robert Weber (born 25 February 1953) is a

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

working in

operational research Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a branch of applied mathematics that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve management and ...

. He is

Emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". In some c ...

Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research in the

Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge Statistics (from German: ', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social ...

. He was admitted to The Magic Circle in 2025. Weber was educated at

Walnut Hills High School Walnut Hills High School is a public college-preparatory high school in Cincinnati, Ohio. Operated by Cincinnati Public Schools, it houses grades seven through twelve. The school was established in 1895 and has occupied its current building s ...

Solihull School Solihull School is a coeducational private day school in Solihull, West Midlands, England. Founded in 1560, it is the oldest school in the town and is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. History In 1560 the revenu ...

and

Downing College, Cambridge Downing College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge and currently has around 950 students. Founded in 1800, it was the only college to be added to the university between 1596 and 1869, and is often described as the oldest of ...

. He graduated in 1974, and completed his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1980 under the supervision of Peter Nash. He has been on the faculty of the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

since 1978, and a fellow of

Queens' College Queens' College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Queens' is one of the 16 "old colleges" of the university, and was founded in 1448 by Margaret of Anjou. Its buildings span the River Cam with the Mathematical Bridge an ...

since 1977 where he has been Vice President from 1996–2007 and again from 2018–2020. He was appointed Churchill Professor in 1994, and he became

Churchill Professor on retirement in 2017. He was Director of the Statistical Laboratory from 1999 to 2009, and was a trustee of the Rollo Davidson Trust. He works on the mathematics of large

complex systems A complex system is a system composed of many components that may interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication s ...

subject to

uncertainty Uncertainty or incertitude refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown, and is particularly relevant for decision ...

. He has made contributions to stochastic scheduling, Markov decision processes,

queueing theory Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. A queueing model is constructed so that queue lengths and waiting time can be predicted. Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because th ...

, the

probabilistic analysis of algorithms In analysis of algorithms, probabilistic analysis of algorithms is an approach to estimate the computational complexity of an algorithm or a computational problem. It starts from an assumption about a probabilistic distribution of the set of all pos ...

, the theory of communications pricing and control, and rendezvous search. Weber and his co-authors were awarded the 2007

INFORMS The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often s ...

prize for their paper on the online

bin packing The bin packing problem is an optimization problem, in which items of different sizes must be packed into a finite number of bins or containers, each of a fixed given capacity, in a way that minimizes the number of bins used. The problem has m ...

algorithm.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Weber, Richard 1953 births 20th-century English mathematicians Alumni of Downing College, Cambridge 21st-century English mathematicians British operations researchers Fellows of Queens' College, Cambridge Living people Cambridge mathematicians People educated at Solihull School Professors of the University of Cambridge Walnut Hills High School alumni