In memoriam of Francesco Maffioli (1941–2012)

On December 7, 2012, Francesco Maffioli passed away in Milan after a sudden and merciless illness. Although he officially retired in November 2011, Francesco had been active until the last days doing research, teaching, and taking care of European projects on engineering education. He was born in Milan on January 2, 1941. He graduated in Electronic Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in 1965 and earned an M.Sc. in Electrophysics at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (NY) in 1969. After starting his research career in electronics and computer networks, he switched to Combinatorial Optimization and Operations Research in the mid-1970s. Since 1980 he was full professor at Politecnico di Milano, where he was director of the Dipartimento di Elettronica from 1984 until 1987. He was visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley in 1973 and 1974, and visiting professor at the Université de Montréal in 1982 and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles during the second semester of the years 1994 to 1997. He wrote a textbook on Mathematical Programming (Maffioli, 2000) and co-edited the Annotated Bibliographies in Combinatorial Optimization (Dell’Amico et al., 1997; Maffioli and Martello, 1997), two volumes of Annals of Operations Research (Archetti and Maffioli, 1984; Simeone et al., 1988), a selection of