Richard Robert Weber (born 25 February 1953) is a mathematician working in operational research. He is

Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research The Churchill Professorship of Mathematics for Operational Research is a professorship in operational research at the University of Cambridge. It was established in 1966 by a benefaction from Esso in memory of Sir Winston Churchill, who died the ...

in the

Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge comprises the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). It is housed in the Centre for ...

. Weber was educated at Walnut Hills High School, Solihull School and

Downing College, Cambridge Downing College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge and currently has around 650 students. Founded in 1800, it was the only college to be added to Cambridge University between 1596 and 1869, and is often described as the olde ...

. He graduated in 1974, and completed his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in 1980 under the supervision of Peter Nash. He has been on the faculty of the University of Cambridge since 1978, and a fellow of Queens' College 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 is 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 which may interact with each other. 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. He has made contributions to stochastic scheduling, Markov decision processes, queueing theory, the

probabilistic analysis of algorithms Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking ...

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

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