Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge

Richard Weber is Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research and a Fellow of Queens' College. He started at Cambridge as a mathematics undergraduate in 1971, proceeding subsequently to Part III, and a PhD in Engineering, where, under the supervision of Peter Nash, his dissertation was titled Multi-Server Stochastic Scheduling. It concerned some practical problems of reservoir management and coal mining, and established the optimality of the least-hazard rate policy for Lady's Nylon Stocking Problem (posed by D. R. Cox. in 1959), the optimal of join-shortest queue routing, and optimality of LEPT and SEPT for problems of minimizing expected makespan and flowtime when scheduling jobs of stochastic processing requirements on parallel processors.

His research ranges over the fields of applied probabilitiy, optimization, statistics, economics, and computer science. He has written on problems in stochastic scheduling, Gittins index, queueing theory, large deviations, stochastic networks, optimization, rendezvous search games, micro economics of communications pricing, mechanism design, online bin packing, manufacturing systems, and stochastic dynamic programming. His research interests include

• mathematics for operational research and systems
• models in telecommunications and operations management
• control of queues
• stochastic networks
• on-line bin-packing
• ergodicity of markov processes
• optimal search
• stochastic scheduling
• dynamic resource allocation
• financial mathematics

He has an interest in magic and conjuring and, after once writing an exam question based on the game, he appeared on ITV's Who Wants to be a Millionaire in October 2003.