John Dutton Conant Little of Lincoln passed away peacefully on September 27, 2024, at age 96. John was an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of management science in the MIT Sloan School. He retired in 2017 after a distinguished career spanning seven decades, making fundamental contributions to operations research and marketing science. Along the way, he touched the lives of hundreds of faculty and staff, and thousands of graduate and undergraduate students from all over the world.
In operations research, he is best known for Little’s Law, his generalized proof of the widely applicable queuing formula, L = λW, published in 1961.
John was born in Boston and grew up in Andover. At MIT, he majored in physics and edited MIT’s Voo Doo magazine, “MIT’s only intentionally humorous publication.” Working at General Electric after graduation, he met his future wife, Elizabeth Alden; they both entered graduate school at MIT in 1951. Elizabeth received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1954 in physics, and John obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1955 in physics and the emerging field of operations research, where he was the first doctoral student.
After serving two years in the U.S. Army, John taught at Case Institute of Technology and then rejoined MIT in the Sloan School in 1962 as an associate professor of operations research and management.
In 1967, he co-founded Management Decision Systems Inc. (MDS), a marketing models software company with clients such as Nabisco, Coca-Cola, and Ocean Spray.
John has been director of the MIT Operations Research Center and, within the Sloan School, head of the management science area, and head of the behavioral and policy sciences area. He was a past president of both the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and the Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and, following their merger, became the first president of the succeeding society, INFORMS. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989.
John, predeceased by his wife Elizabeth and his two sisters, Margaret and Francis, leaves four children (Jack, Sarah, Thomas, and Ruel), eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
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