Frederick Hillier (1936-2026)

 I never took a course from Fred Hillier when I was a PhD student in the Department of Operations Research at Stanford from 1971-73, but as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois from 1974 I taught undergraduate OR from the introductory OR textbook by Hillier and Lieberman.

Here's his Stanford obituary:

Influential textbook author Frederick S. Hillier dies at 89
Hillier’s work shaped operations research theory and practice at Stanford and beyond, with his textbooks introducing the field to generations of learners worldwide.

"Frederick S. Hillier, professor emeritus of operations research in Stanford Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, passed away on Jan. 9, 2026. He was 89.
...
"Hillier was best known for co-authoring Introduction to Operations Research, first published in 1967. “His textbook played a major role in defining what operations research is,” said Peter W. Glynn, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford. “It helped people in adjacent fields understand what the field is and how it works.” 

...

"When he arrived at Stanford, Hillier was assigned Gerald J. Lieberman as his freshman adviser. Lieberman introduced Hillier to the emerging field of operations research and became Hillier’s undergraduate mentor, doctoral advisor, department chair, and eventually his co-author.

...

"Following Lieberman’s encouragement, Hillier stayed at Stanford for graduate school. He earned an MS in statistics in 1959 and a PhD in operations research in 1961. He joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering that same year.

...

"Hillier retired in 1996 and continued revising his textbooks into his late 80s. The 11th edition of Introduction to Operations Research was published in 2020, and he completed the manuscript for the 12th edition in 2023." 

Unraveling in law clerk recruitment, along political lines

 "What's past is prologue:" law clerkships are unraveling yet again, with conservative judges defecting first.

The Harvard Crimson has the story:

Conservative Judges’ Early Hiring Fuels Two-Track Clerkship System at Harvard Law  By Sierra R. Pape and Uy B. Pham

"Federal judges — particularly those aligned with the conservative legal movement — are increasingly recruiting Harvard Law School students during their first year, accelerating a clerkship hiring process that has traditionally taken place much later in law school.

While most judges continue to follow the “on-plan” timeline, where applications open during the summer after students’ second year, a growing number — disproportionately conservative and often affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies — are hiring months earlier through informal networks.

The shift is a sign of a dual system of clerkship hiring at HLS: one track that is formal, application-based, and largely followed by students applying to work with liberal judges, and another that is earlier, network-driven, and dominated by conservative pipelines."

 HT: Martha Gershun

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Here's an earlier post on the same divide among judges:

Monday, September 28, 2020

Judicial clerkships in the time of coronavirus--uneven compliance with the pilot hiring plan, and post-clerkship connections

 An article in the UC Davis Law Review Online discusses the hiring of law clerks by U.S. judges, during the current pandemic,  with reference to the  Federal Law Clerk Hiring (Pilot) Plan which is in its second year this year. (The plan calls for judges to delay hiring second year law students until June, and to leave offers open for at least 48 hours.)

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Pilot and the Coronavirus Pandemic  by Carl Tobias, UC Davis Law Review Online, 2020,54, 1-20.

The article says that compliance with the plan is uneven, but that "numerous jurists who support the nascent pilot are Democratic Presidents' confirmees ... while copious judges who seem to oppose the pilot  in turn are GOP chief executives' appointees..." (p9).

 

 

 

Complex tragedy in a headline: Israeli Court Lets Parents of Gaza Hostage Killed by IDF Fire to Use Son's Sperm for IVF

 Rarely does a headline capture so much of a complicated tragedy.  Read it at least twice.

From Haaretz: 

Israeli Court Lets Parents of Gaza Hostage Killed by IDF Fire to Use Son's Sperm for IVF 

"An Israeli family court has allowed the parents of Yotam Haim, who was mistakenly killed by Israeli troops after escaping Hamas captivity, to use his sperm posthumously for in vitro fertilization, citing his presumed wish to have children even after his death. "

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This is a story that also involves the modern technology that can be brought to bear on human reproduction, including not only sperm donation and IVF, but also perhaps egg donation and surrogacy. 

First box of books

Moral Economics won't be for sale until May 12, but the supply chain is stirring: my publisher sent me a box of finished copies.

Trust and medicine: Marcella Alsan on Econ to Go

 One of the big lessons of market design is that markets need social support to work well. That applies with particular force to the market for medical care, which (for its sins) isn't universally trusted.  Neale Mahoney interviews my remarkable colleague Marcella Alsan about her work, starting with her QJE paper on the downstream consequences of the infamous Tuskegee experiment:

Alsan, Marcella, and Marianne Wanamaker. "Tuskegee and the health of black men." The quarterly journal of economics 133, no. 1 (2018): 407-455.

 

And here's the Econ to Go podcast: 

 

"In this episode of Econ To Go, Neale Mahoney sits down with Stanford physician-economist and MacArthur Fellow Marcella Alsan to explore how trust and representation shape the U.S. health care system. Her research shows that historical events like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study continue to affect healthcare use and health outcomes today, and that trust isn’t abstract, it’s measurable. The conversation also highlights how trust can be built, how under-representation in clinical trials can influence both physician behavior and patient trust, and other key themes, including:

(01:33) The mistrust problem
(06:50) Representation as remedy 
(12:18) Clinical trials and trust in data 
(24:04) Eroding trust across the system" 

A decade of progress in kidney exchange in India

 This morning I zoomed in to the tail end of a quiet celebration in India of a decade of collaboration between the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation  (APKD) and our Indian medical colleagues..

Mike Rees and I both had sent messages of support, and during the call I spoke about my hope that India, which already does the third most kidney transplants in the world, will in the coming decade come to be the country that does the most kidney exchange transplants. That in turn could lead to India eventually becoming a global attractor for patient-donor pairs from countries that don't have lots of transplants or exchanges, to come to India to participate in kidney exchange there.

There remain many obstacles to be overcome before that can happen, but there's been so much progress in India already that those are real possibilities.

Here's the message I emailed to the founding team yesterday:

"Dear Vivek, Pranjal, Mike, Atul  and Colleagues: It’s amazing that the collaboration  between the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Center at the Dr. H L Trivedi Institute of Transplantation Sciences, and the Alliance for Paired Donation is entering its second decade.  It’s been thrilling for me to observe the progress that you have made.  I recall vividly meeting Dr. Trivedi in 2019 in his hospital room, and I was later deeply honored to deliver The Dr H.L. Trivedi Oration at the ISOT Meeting  in 2022.  I’ve learned so much from Vivek, and I will never forget watching Pranjal perform a robotic surgery.  And it was memorable that you both were able to visit us at Stanford for the kidney summit organized by APKD and Stanford Impact Labs.
 

"Seeing what you have accomplished has been one of the highlights of my career in market design. It’s good that we’re all still young, since I’m looking forward to the next decade of accomplishment in India." 
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Here's Mike's message:

"Mike Rees on the 10-year anniversary of IKDRC and APKD working together

"I remember the first time I met Vivek in 2016 at the TTS meeting in Hong Kong. Vivek received the “International Transplantation Science Mentee-Mentor” Award at the TTS 2016 Congress in Hong Kong. The award recognized his work on "Impact of Single Center Kidney Paired Donation Transplantation to Increase Donor Pool in India," completed under the mentorship of Prof. H.L. Trivedi and Prof. P.R. Shah. I remember meeting Vivek, Dr. PR Shah and Pranjal at the award ceremony and thinking about how wonderful it would be if we could work together. I imagined harnessing their great passion of helping patients through kidney transplantation and paired exchange and combining that with the APKD’s powerful software employing Al Roth’s Nobel Prize winning algorithm. While in Hong Kong, Vivek and I went to dinner at my first vegetarian restaurant and there we agreed to work together to try to help expand kidney exchange in India. 
 

"Three years later I travelled to Ahmedabad in May of 2019 with Alvin Roth for the ISOT Mid-term meeting. During that trip, Al and I watched Pranjal do a retroperitoneal donor nephrectomy and a robotic kidney transplantation. It was my first time seeing a robotic kidney transplant and it was so amazing. I met Dr. Himanshu Patel on that trip and I also had the honor of visiting Dr. HL Trivedi and his wife with Vivek. What a legacy Dr. Trivedi has left and I am so proud that APKD has been able to work together with Vivek, Himanshu, Pranjal and all the members of the IKDRC team to extend his wonderful vision.
 

"Since that meeting in Hong Kong, I have now made 12 trips to India and have become a big fan of Indian food and diversity of Indian culture. I have been so impressed with the passion and commitment of doctors across India, but none more so than at IKDRC. Along the way I have been fortunate to have been joined by Atul Agnihotri, Shridhar Hanchinal, and Trilly Mathew to expand our work in India. We are so grateful for the amazing example the IKDRC team has demonstrated in terms of what is possible when hard work and technology come together to saves the lives of patients with kidney disease. It is truly a joy to celebrate today with you our tenth anniversary of the work between IKDRC and APKD as we commemorate all that we have accomplished together!"

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 Over the last decade I've blogged many times in connection with transplant progress in India.  Here's a selection related to this ten-year anniversary:

Wednesday, January 13, 2016  77 Kidney Exchange transplants in 2015 at one transplant center in India

Friday, April 14, 2017  A transplant center in India has done 300 kidney exchange transplants

Wednesday, May 3, 2017 Mike Rees in India to help remove obstacles to kidney exchange

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 Robot-assisted kidney transplantation in Ahmedabad, India.

 

Wednesday, February 3, 2021 Non-Simultaneous Kidney Exchange Cycles in India: new design, in Transplant International by Kute and Rees et al.

Thursday, October 13, 2022 The Dr H.L. Trivedi Oration at the Indian Society of Transplantation (ISOT) Meeting 2022

Tuesday, February 27, 2024  Stanford Impact Labs announces support for kidney exchange in Brazil, India, and the U.S.

Saturday, April 19, 2025 One Nation One Swap: National kidney exchange in India

 Thursday, August 7, 2025 Stanford conference on extending kidney exchange

 

Zhang Xuefeng (1984-2026), guided Chinese families through the college admissions process

 A Chinese college-admissions influencer has died, who helped families choose which colleges and majors to rank, after they received the results from the gaokao, the national admissions exam.

The NYT has the story:

China Mourned an Education Influencer. The Grief Was a Quiet Revolt.
Zhang Xuefeng helped people navigate the country’s unforgiving higher education system. The public outpouring after his death was a quiet rebuke to the punishing process.  By Li Yuan

 "Zhang Xuefeng became famous in China for telling students and their parents what few educators would: which majors were useless, which careers were dead ends and which dreams ordinary families could not afford.

“Knock out your children if they want to study journalism,” he famously said.

“The humanities all lead to service work, and service work, in one word, is sucking up” to clients.

...
"But when Mr. Zhang died last month, at 41, something uncommon in today’s China happened. In a country where large-scale, spontaneous public emotion is rarely tolerated, tens of thousands of people from all over the country showed up at his memorial service in the eastern city of Suzhou. They stood in line for hours to pay their respects, some carrying flowers, one clutching a college admission letter. On the Chinese internet, posts and videos about Mr. Zhang and his death drew more than six billion views in a single day, according to a media monitoring firm.

...

"The gratitude directed at Mr. Zhang, who had 27 million followers on the short-video platform Douyin, reflected the fears of ordinary Chinese families trying to navigate an increasingly opaque and unforgiving education system. The extraordinary mourning after his death revealed how much of contemporary China is living with that anxiety.

"Students and parents thanked him for helping them navigate the high-stakes process of choosing a college major in China. Through livestreams and consulting sessions, he explained which majors led to stable jobs, which industries were declining and which professional certificates were worth pursuing — information readily available to families with connections or advanced education but far harder for everyone else to find. 

...

"For decades, the general college entrance exam, known in Chinese as the gaokao, was widely seen as a pathway to changing one’s fate; it was brutally competitive but capable of delivering upward mobility. As universities expanded and the job market deteriorated, that promise weakened. Getting into college became easier. Turning a degree into security did not.
...

"In many provinces, families have less than two weeks between getting the results of the exam and the deadline to apply to college. In that time, they need to make sense of hundreds of majors, universities and career paths. 

...

"The families who turn to consultants like Mr. Zhang are not, for the most part, China’s elite. But neither are they the poorest. Wang described his clients as families in the broad middle: small-business owners, office workers, skilled laborers and lower-level state employees. They often have money to pay for guidance but lack the social capital or institutional knowledge needed to navigate the system confidently on their own. "