The Department of Mathematical Sciences had its origins in the fall of 1946, when an undergraduate curriculum in industrial engineering was first introduced in response to requests from returning military veterans, who constituted nearly half the entering class in the School of Engineering that semester. The program provided basic training in chemistry, physics, mathematics and the principles of accounting, industrial organization, production methods, labor relations, business regulations, political economy and psychology. In the 1970s the Department expanded dramatically, and, with its nineteen faculty members in the late 1970s, became one of the largest departments in the University. In 1973 the Department was renamed the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and began emphasizing the use of mathematical methods to solve the problems raised by the natural sciences (i.e., astronomy, physics and chemistry), as well as the modern sciences (i.e., operations research, demography, management science, psychology, information science and computer science). Maintaining its concentration on modern applied mathematics to the present day, the Department has developed five major training and research areas: (1) probability and statistics; (2) operations research and optimization; (3) discrete mathematics; (4) matrix analysis; and (5) computational mathematics.