15 Facts About Ailsa Land

Ailsa Horton Land was a professor of Operational Research in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and was the first woman professor of Operational Research in Britain.

Ailsa Land is most well known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm along with Alison Doig whilst carrying out research at the London School of Economics in 1960.

Ailsa Land was married to Frank Land, who is an emeritus Professor at the LSE.

Ailsa Land's father worked in his family sports retail business and later became a salesman for Dunlop.

Ailsa Land was able to enter the LSE to study for a degree in economics in 1946, her position as a demobilised servicewoman helping her gain access and a grant.

Ailsa Land won the Bowley Prize for a first-year Economics paper.

Ailsa Land obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics in 1956, her dissertation was entitled An Application of the Techniques of Linear Programming to the Transportation of Coal, supervised by George Morton.

Ailsa Land is most known for her development, along with Alison Doig, of what later came to be called the branch-and-bound method for optimization problems with integer variables.

Ailsa Land worked with Helen Makower and George Morton in the late 1950s on a number of integer programming problems.

In 1973, Ailsa Land published her book Fortran Codes for Mathematical Programming: Linear, Quadratic and Discrete, written jointly with Susan Powell.

Ailsa Land mentored both master's level and PhD students, several of whom have achieved international distinction.

Ailsa Land was awarded the Harold Larnder prize by the Canadian Operational Research Society in 1994 for achieving international distinction in operational research.

Ailsa Land was posthumously awarded the EURO Gold Medal, the highest distinction within OR in Europe, at the EURO Conference in 2021.

Ailsa Land was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies in 2023.

Ailsa Land met her future husband Frank Land, in her graduating class.