Conway, Richard Walter, 1931-

Richard Walter Conway (December 12, 1931 – March 19, 2024) was an American industrial engineer and computer scientist who was the Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management, Emeritus in the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Conway spent his entire academic career, both as a student and a professor, at Cornell and held faculty positions at Cornell in several different areas: industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, and management science. He was especially known for his work and publications in foundational questions about computer simulation methodology; in writing about production scheduling theory; in developing computer languages and language compilers, including the widely used PL/C dialect of IBM's PL/I language; in authoring or co-authoring textbooks about computer programming; and in developing simulation software for manufacturing. He was also the first director of the Office of Computing Services at Cornell.