I recently had call to put forward my views on interdisciplinarity and OR. My current funding comes from a programme that aims to create an interdisciplinary synthesis between natural and social scientists to solve problems relating to sustainable rural development.

I am now increasingly of the view that social scientists are arrogant, natural scientists are ignorant, and both need bombing out of their ivory towers if interdisciplinarity is to have a chance. To understand why see http://www.relu.ac.uk/research/Discussions%20on%20interdisciplinarity.html and the article on Operational Research.

I’d be interested if anyone else has formed opinions one way or another. It would be instructive to share them. email daniel

Recently I discovered that one OR professional did become an interdisciplinarian. He was Baron Solly Zuckerman, a South African, the chief scientific advisor to the British Government (1964 to 1971). One thing he did was to challenge the efficacy of monodisciplinary academia to serve policy. He is credited with introducing science into policy making in Western European Government see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solly_Zuckerman. Also see him mentioned as part of the early history of OR with respect to South Africa http://www.orssa.org.za/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=AboutTheSociety.EarlyHistory