 In the early 1950s, management science was a growing discipline that did not yet have a home society or journal in which its works could be published; the Operations Research Society of America had been formed, but concerned itself with somewhat different problems.At the invitation of Melvin E. Salveson, a group met at the University of California, Los Angeles in the summer of 1953, and again at Columbia University in December 1953, to form what became The Institute of Management Sciences.William Cooper's wife Ruth helped draft the Institute's charter; Cooper himself was elected as its first president, and Andrew Vázsonyi became its first past president (without previously having been president).