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Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science

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People keep on badgering me about what do I do and how did I earn my living? Well, I am a management scientist. They respond with a blank stare.
Some time ago a curious person asked a management scientist, "What is Management Science?" The expert who was a wit answered, "Management Science is what management scientists do". But an even greater wit, C. West Churchman, overheard this and corrected the statement: "Management Science is what management scientists think they do. Today, there is an unequivocal answer: "Management Science is what is printed in the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science".
So now when a friend badgers me I show the Encyclopedia, "This is what I and my colleagues do". He weighs the tome, leaves through and typically says "You told me you help management. This is a book on math. How come?" I shrug my shoulders, "As you can see, we find that math is the most effective way to deal with some management issues.
We need to realize that publication of an encyclopedia is a defining moment in our intellectual history. When in 1745 the publisher André Le Breton approached Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French philosopher, who also wrote novels, essays, plays, and art and literary criticism with a view to bringing out a French translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopedia after two other translators had withdrawn from the project. Diderot undertook the task with the distinguished mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert as coeditor but soon profoundly changed the nature of the publication, broadening its scope and turning it into a vast, new 35-volume work, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers which is usually known as the Encyclopédie . He gathered around him a team of dedicated litterateurs, scientists, and even priests, including Voltaire and Montesquieu. All were fired with a common purpose: to further knowledge by a "rational dictionary" and to bring out the essential principles and applications of every art and science.
Drs. Saul I. Gass and the late Carl M. Harris followed in the footsteps of Diderot and d'Alembert, gathered an international group of the best brains and produced the monumental 917-page tome of the Encyclopedia of OR/MS, with 228 major expository articles to provide decision makers and problem solvers "comprehensive overview of the wide range of ideas, methodologies, and synergistic forces that combine to form the pre-eminent decision-aiding fields of operations research and management science".