John Little (academic)
American mathematics professor and scholar of operations research (1928–2024)
John Dutton Conant Little (February 1, 1928 – September 27, 2024) was an American operations researcher who was Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was best known for his result in operations research, Little's law.
Life and career
Born in Boston on February 1, 1928, he earned a B. S. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1948) and worked at General Electric (1948–50). His Ph.D. on Use of Storage Water in a Hydroelectric System used dynamic programming, and advised by Philip M. Morse, was the first ever awarded in operations research (1955).
Next, he taught at the Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve) from 1957 to 1962, before joining the faculty at MIT in 1962 where he since has worked. He was visiting professor at INSEAD (1988).
His earlier research in operations research involved traffic signal control, and gave him fame as he formed the Little's law in 1961. It states: "The average number of customers in a stable system (over some interval) is equal to their average arrival rate, multiplied by their average time in the system." A corollary has been added: "The average time in the system is equal to the average time in queue plus the average time it takes to receive service." Little is considered to be a founder of marketing science, having conducted fundamental research in models of individual choice behavior, adaptive control of promotional spending, and marketing mix models for consumer packaged goods. He has also started companies such as Management Decisions Systems and Kana Software. The John D. C. Little Award is awarded annually by INFORMS. He is the father of John N. Little.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3809421. VIAF identifies the subject as 48152965. The Library of Congress control number is n83319145. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 2024, 1948 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Little (academic)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.