Russell Cleven Coile

Russell Cleven Coile (1917-2011) was an American operations researcher.

Russell Cleven Coile

Life

Russell Cleven Coile, Sr. was born on March 11, 1917 in Washington, DC. He earned a Bachelor’s degree and two graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, in Cambridge, MA, where he a student assistant working for Vannevar Bush on his microfilm rapid selector. He later received a PhD in Information Science from The City University, London, England.

He was a geophysical observer in an observatory in Peru. Coile served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, and was the project officer for IFF, the transponder used in aircraft. When the U.S. Air Force was created in 1947, he transferred Air Force to continue his projects and retired from the USAF Reserve with the rank of Colonel.

After World War II, Coile he worked as an engineer on designing transmission antennas for radio and television. He then worked for 32 years on military Operations Research at the Center for Naval Analyses.

In 1982 he moved to the Monterey peninsula in California to be Chief Scientist at the Combat Development Experimentation Command at Ford Ord and Fort Hunter Liggett. He then became an emergency manager for local governments and an adjunct professor at the Naval Postgraduate School researching disaster response. He died on June 4, 2011 in Pacific Grove, California.

Contributions

Coile's contributions to radio and television transmission, operations research, and disaster response ranged widely. Within information science he contributed primarily to bibliometric studies of subject areas and Lotka's law on the distribution of the frequency of authorship.

Publications

In his later publications, Coile's name is given as R. C. Coile, Sr, to distinguish him from his son Russell Cleven Coile, Jr, who published extensively on health care management.

Coile published an autobiography, DisasterMan (2009) in which Appendix B (pp 635-642) lists disaster response an preparedness papers and presentations and Appendix C (pp 643-657) lists other professional papers and presentations. Those relating to information science include:

• "Periodical literature for electronic engineers." Proceedings of the IRE 38, no. 12 (1950): 1380-1384.
• "Periodical literature for electrical engineers." Journal of Documentation 8, no. 4 (1952): 209-226.
• "Information sources for electrical and electronics engineers." IEEE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech 12, no. 3 (1969): 71-78.
• "Lotka and information science." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 26, no. 2 (1975): 133-134.
• "A new application of computers for information scientists." The Information Scientist 9, no 4 (Dec 1975): 149-152.
• Bibliometric study of frequency distributions of scientific productivity. PhD dissertation, City University, London, 1977. A extended summary is in his Disasterman" autobiography (2009, pp 288-304).
• "Lotka's frequency distribution of scientific productivity." Journal of the American Society for Information science 28, no. 6 (1977): 366-370.
• "The role of amateur radio in providing emergency electronic communication for disaster management." Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal 6, no. 3 (1997): 176-185.

Further reading

• Autobiography: Disasterman : a biographical memoir. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse Inc., 2009.
• Russell Cleven Coile. Obituary. 2011. [1]
• "Russell C. Coile. Military rsearcher." Washington Post. Obituary. July 2, 2011. [2]
• Coile, Ellen Miller. Under Two Flags: A Memoir. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2017. Autobiography by Coile's second wife.