a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science at the University of Lancaster, UK in 1967. He got a Silver Medal from the Operational Research Society in 1971. Other honors came from the Washington University in St. Louis in 1993, the University of New Haven in 1997, the Pontificia Universidad Catolica Del Peru, Lima in 1999 and the University of Lincolnshire & Humberside, UK in 1999. That year from the UK Systems Society he got an Award for outstanding achievement in Systems Thinking and Practice. Ackoff married Alexandra Makar on July 17, 1949. The couple had three children: Alan W., Karen B., and Karla S. After his wife's death, Ackoff married Helen Wald on December 20, 1987. Between 2003 and 2007, Ackoff delivered an annual series of public lectures, both half-day and full-day, for which the Ackoff family has granted permission for public viewing at this link. Russell L. Ackoff died unexpectedly Thursday, October 29, 2009, after complications of hip replacement surgery. Work Throughout the years Ackoff's work in research, consulting and education has involved more than 250 corporations and 50 governmental agencies in the U.S. and abroad. Operations research Russell Ackoff started his career in operations research at the end of the 1940s. His 1957 book Introduction to Operations Research, co-authored with C. West Churchman and Leonard Arnoff, was one of the first publications that helped define the field. The influence of this work, according to Kirby and Rosenhead (2005), "on the early development of the discipline in the USA and in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s is hard to over-estimate". In the 1970s Ackoff became one of the most important critics of the so-called "technique-dominated Operations Research", and starting proposing more participative approaches. His critiques, according to Kirby and Rosenhead (2005), "had little resonance within the USA, but were picked up both in Britain, where they helped to stimulate the growth of Problem Structuring Methods, and in the systems community world-wide", such as soft systems methodology from Peter Checkland. Purposeful systems In 1972 Ackoff wrote a book with Frederick Edmund Emery about purposeful systems, which focused on the question how systems thinking relates to human behaviour. "Individual systems are purposive", they said, "knowledge and understanding of their aims can only be