Ferdinand Francis Leimkuhler

Ferdinand Francis Leimkuhler (1928-2025) was an American industrial engineer.

Life

Ferdinand ("Ferd") Francis Leimkuhler was born on December 31, 1928 in Baltimore, Maryland. He completed a bachelor's degrees in chemistry at Loyola University and in engineering science from Johns Hopkins University. He then worked briefly for DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware before returning to Johns Hopkins for a doctorate in industrial engineering with a dissertation on the transport of radioactive materials.

In 1961 Leimkuhler joined the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana and taught courses in operations research and engineering economics. He headed the program from 1969 to 1974 and again from 1981 to 1993. He was visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and at the University of Ljubliana, Slovenia.

He retired in 2000 and died on May 17, 2025 in Berkeley, California.

Contributions

In addition his varied interests in industrial engineering Leimkuhler pioneered the application of operations techniques to library problems and analyses of Bradford's law of scattering modeling the dispersion of literature on a topic across different journals.

Publications

Numerous publications relating to information systems and library planning are listed in Buckland, M. K. & D. H. Kraft, eds. "A bibliography on Operations Research in libraries." Pp. 355-392. In: Brophy, P., M. K. Buckland, & A. Hindle, eds. Reader in Operations Research for Libraries. Englewood, CO: Information Handling Services, 1976. [1]

• Trucking of radioactive materials: safety vs. economy in highway transport. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1963.
• "Compact book storage in libraries." With J. G. Cox. Operations Research 12, no. 3 (1964): 419-427.
• "Systems analysis in university libraries." College & Research Libraries 27, no. 1 (1966): 13-18.
• "The Bradford distribution." Journal of documentation 23, no. 3 (1967): 197-207.
• "Analytical models for library planning." With M. D. Cooper. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 22, no. 6 (1971): 390-398.
• "Library and information center management." With A. Billingsley. Annual review of information science and technology 7 (1972): 499-533.
• "A relationship between Lotka's law, Bradford's law, and Zipf's law." With Ye‐Sho Chen. Journal of the American Society for information science 37, no. 5 (1986): 307-314.
• An enduring quest: the story of Purdue industrial engineers. Purdue University Press, 2009.

Offices

• Technical Assistance Program, Purdue University. Director, 1993-2000.

Further reading

• "Ferdinand F. Leimkuhler." Journal & Courier (Lafayette, Indiana). [2]
• Ferdinand Leimkuhler 1928-2025. Purdue University, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering. Obiturary. [3]
• "Ferdinand F. Leimkuhler." [German] Wikipedia [4]