five posts about motherhood and operations research

Happy Mother’s Day! It’s no secret that I apply operations research to my life. Here are five posts about parenting and operations research.

1. On queueing theory and work-life balence: how role models, having children early in my career, and understanding queueing theory helped me maintain some semblance of balance.

2. The book Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths features me talking about how I employ the critical path method to get my three daughters to school on time every morning.

3. What the Birthday Problem teaches us about when to have children: insights on congestion in hospitals.

4. I blogged about parenting 11 years ago as an assistant professor after the birth of my second child, when I wrote “I worry more about day care than tenure.” A lot has changed in my life since then (tenure and then promotion to full as well as a third child), but I still vividly remember how the logistics of parenting consumed a lot of my energy.

5. In a post about operations research and parenting, I note that parenthood is not an optimization problem, its a feasibility problem.  There are many ways to be a good parent 🙂