Ops

It's well worth reading this Boston Globe article on Operations Research--the field of figuring out how to improve the operations of fairly hum drum activities such as lines, restocking shelves, etc.

The area of ops research I've become most familiar with is queuing theory which was cooked up in 1909 by a Danish engineer for the Copenhagen telephone company. One of the central units in queueing theory when applied to the phone business is named after him, the Erlang.

Over a century later, people are still using it and refining it to improve their operations. Remarkable.