The Book of the Congregation

Saint Warren of Princeton

In the beginning, there was noise. There were forecasts and spreadsheets and dashboards and an industry that had confused measuring things with understanding them. And then a professor at Princeton sat down and named the structure underneath all of it.

Warren Powell did not invent the problem. He named it. He gave the field a spine when it had been walking around for decades pretending a collection of disconnected techniques was a discipline. Sequential Decision Analysis is not a methodology. It is a grammar. A way of reading every decision problem in the world and seeing the same bones underneath, no matter the industry, no matter the domain.

He wrote the books. He proved the math. And then, when lesser men would have stayed in the academy and collected citations, he descended into the world of practice and asked whether anyone was actually using it.

He wrote the foreword to our scripture. He is, without question, the patron saint of this church.

Saint Joannes of Paris

There is a particular kind of prophet who does not announce himself. He just builds something that works and then explains, calmly and at length, why everything else doesn't.

Joannes Vermorel founded Lokad in 2008 and spent the next seventeen years being right about things the industry was not ready to hear. Single-number forecasts are a lie. Uncertainty is not a problem to be eliminated, it is a structure to be priced. Supply chain is not a planning problem. It is an economics problem. The dashboard does not make the decision. Someone has to make the decision, and if you have not given them the tools to price the tradeoff, you have given them nothing.

He built a company on these heresies. He grew it profitably without investor money after the seed round, which in the current era is its own form of prophecy. He wrote the lectures. He wrote the book. He told the truth about uncertainty even when the truth was harder to demonstrate in a deck.

Saint Meinolf of Brown

Most people who spend twenty-five years inside the walls of mathematical optimization come out believing in the walls.

Meinolf Sellmann came out believing they were in the wrong place.

He built MIP solvers. He was a professor of AI at Brown. He worked at IBM, GE, and Shopify. He won over twenty international research awards. And somewhere in all of that, he arrived at a conclusion that took courage to act on: the tools the industry had been using for forty years were not just limited, they were architecturally wrong for the problems they were being asked to solve.

So he built Seeker. Not a better version of what existed. A different thing entirely. A solver that learns how to search the problem it is solving, which means the tool itself is a decision system.

The church canonizes people for being willing to say, after two decades of mastery, that the thing they had mastered was not enough, and then building the thing that was.

Cardinal John Brandon

The Cardinal came to the faith through proximity. He watched the Saints work. He watched them think. And something that had been latent his entire career finally had a name.

He had always been building things, asking the right questions before he knew the questions had a structure. What he lacked was not the instinct. What he lacked was the language. The people gave him the language.

His particular charism is the carrying. He takes what the Saints built and walks it into boardrooms and technical teams hungry for something better, whether they know it yet or not. He does not simplify the doctrine to make it palatable. He makes it legible without making it smaller.

Cardinal Adam

The Cardinal who found the gospel first and had the grace to share it.

Adam DeJans Jr. came to Operations Research through the front door, which is to say through the mathematics, which is to say he understood the thing before most people in the room had decided whether it was worth understanding. He brought Warren Powell's framework into Toyota. He brought it to his co-author. He co-founded Bit Bros and co-wrote the scripture and has continued, with characteristic calm, to build the thing while others are still deciding whether the thing is real.

The congregation honors Cardinal Adam for a specific virtue that is undervalued in this field: he does not need credit for the work to be good work. He just does it. That is the disposition of someone who has actually internalized the doctrine, which holds that the decision is the thing, not the story about the decision.

Brother Felicien

The gospel reached France.

It reached France because Brother Felicien read it, understood it, and then did what monks do: he told people. Not loudly. Not with the apparatus of marketing. He promoted the work because he believed in the work, which is the only reason worth promoting anything, and a reason that is rarer than this industry pretends.

He holds a PhD. He operates at the intersection of decision science and practice in the way the church most respects, which is to say he does not merely study the doctrine, he applies it and then returns to the text to see whether the application was faithful.

The church notes that the gospel crossing a language border and landing with full fidelity is a specific kind of miracle. It requires a translator who understands not just the words but the intent.