Robert McDowell Thrall (1914–2006) was an American mathematician and a pioneer of operations research.
In 1977 he received a joint appointment in Rice's newly established Graduate School of Business, where he taught decision analysis to MBA Students.
[3] His research accomplishments during that period include the celebrated hooklength formula for the dimension of an irreducible representation of a symmetric group, or equivalently the number of standard Young tableaux of a given shape (with J. Sutherland Frame and G. de B. Robinson) and the influential Brauer-Thrall conjectures (with Richard Brauer).
[4] During WW II he began to study operations research and development of mathematical models for military applications.
[5] With William W. Cooper, Rajiv Banker, and other collaborators, he wrote a number of important papers on data envelopment analysis (DEA).