Ali Emrouznejad

I always found Bill ready to help, positive and available…. His passion for learning and helping others continued until the last day of his life.
I met Professor William W Cooper for the first time at the IFORS conference in Vancouver, Canada, in the year 1996. For me it was the first major DEA session that I had ever attended. I was also very happy to meet Bill and many other well-known DEA scholars in that conference. I remember Bill was in my presentation and following that we had some discussion in which he gave me a lot of energy to continue on this subject.
Later, in 1997, I met him at Warwick when I also demonstrated the DEAzone website to him.  A couple of years later, Bill wrote me a letter signed and cc to E. Rhodes encouraging me to continue the website.
“The efforts embodied in this Homepage have been important in contributing to the widespread (and increasing) uses of DEA …”.  Signed Bill, 2001

When I dedicate the DEAzone to the DEA inventors, he again wrote me
“I am deeply honored, as I know would have been the case for the late Dr. Charnes, as I am sure will be the case for Eduardo Rhodes. ….

All of us are familiar with this page which we, as well as others, have used to help us in developing and extending DEA for additional uses….

Many thanks. We all owe you a debt of gratitude for these signal efforts”.  Signed Bill, 2001
I always found Bill ready to help, positive and available.  Although I never wrote a join paper with him, in my review paper (published in Journal of Socio-Economics Planning Science, 42(3)) he encouraged me to join Barnett R. Parker and Gabriel Tavares, he mentored the project until it is been published. Later in 2010, I have developed a step-by-step guide for DEA users “The COOPER Framework” (a join paper with Kristof De Witte, EJOR 207 (2010)). The paper published in EJOR, 20102, before submitting this paper Bill read and commented on each and every step of the proposed framework, it was also my honor that he agreed to use such a title “COOPER” for this paper.
His passion for learning and helping others continued until the last day of his life.

Ali Emrouznejad
July 2012