The Power of Two: How Richard and Liz Larson Turned Equations Into Impact
In a world overwhelmed by complexity, urban congestion, long hospital waits, under-resourced classrooms, solutions often get lost in data. Cities were struggling to manage public systems, and education gaps widened in regions without access to strong STEM programs. The need was not just for better models, but for human-centric answers.
Enter Richard Larson, MIT professor and systems thinker, best known as “Dr. Queue.” His groundbreaking research in operations research and urban systems turned queues into blueprints for smarter cities. But alongside him, quietly shaping the narrative, was his partner, Mary Elizabeth Murray (Liz), the operational heart of several global education initiatives.
Together, they led MIT BLOSSOMS, a global initiative making science and math lessons accessible through engaging video content. Their impact reached across 20+ countries, transforming passive learning into active exploration, especially in underserved classrooms. Liz ensured the content was locally adaptable; Richard ensured it was globally scalable.
Their journey was not a single breakthrough, it was decades of partnership. From launching the Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) to bridging gaps between technology and humanity, Richard and Liz showed that true innovation isn’t just about what you build, it’s who you build it with.
At a time when AI and automation dominate headlines, the Larsons remind us: real progress happens when systems are designed with people at the center. Their legacy is proof that data and compassion can co-exist, and together, can change the world.
Where It All Began: Curiosity Meets Chaos
It started with questions. Why do ambulances take so long to arrive? How can cities organize chaos better? And most of all, how can math help? These weren’t ordinary curiosities. They belonged to a young man named Richard Larson, fresh out of MIT’s classrooms and already knee-deep in problems that plagued real people in real cities.
Born in the boroughs of New York and shaped by constant movement, Queens to Jersey to Massachusetts, Larson learned early to adapt. He entered MIT as an undergrad and never really left. What drew him in was not just the prestige of the institution. It was the invitation to solve. Not in theory, but in life.
His early doctoral work focused on optimizing police patrols, a gritty, ground-level issue at a time when urban systems were straining under pressure. It was math with a conscience. The kind of research that made people safer. That work eventually earned him the prestigious Lanchester Prize, but more importantly, it planted the seed for how he’d approach every problem that followed: don’t just model the system, understand the people in it.
By his twenties, Larson was not just crunching numbers. He was shaping the invisible infrastructure that kept cities running. Police. Ambulances. Queues. And behind it all, the same mission: use models to make life better, for everyone. Not someday. Now.
That urgency never left him. It became the compass for everything that came next.
Turning Equations Into Action
What makes someone stay at one place for five decades? In Larson’s case, it was not comfort, it was a challenge. From his earliest years as a professor at MIT, he refused to stay in a single lane. Instead, he built bridges, between departments, between disciplines, and between problems that most people treated as separate.
Electrical engineering was his home base, but urban studies quickly followed. Then operations research. Computer science. Civil engineering. He wore all these hats not to show off but because the problems he cared about didn’t fit neatly into boxes. Urban congestion. Public safety. Healthcare delivery. You couldn’t solve those with one toolkit.
So Larson assembled his own.
He didn’t just study queues, he became the guy people called when queues got out of hand. Hospitals. Airports. Call centers. If people were waiting too long, he could model it, decode it, and improve it. The media dubbed him “Dr. Queue,” but his real focus was on people, not lines.
He also led key centers at MIT, including the Operations Research Center and later, the Center for Advanced Educational Services, bringing system thinking into education, service delivery, and public policy. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, served as president of INFORMS, and earned almost every major operations research award in the book.
But for Larson, accolades were just echoes. His real measure of success? Whether his models made someone’s day easier. Whether they helped someone get healthcare faster. Whether a better queue helped a parent make it home in time for dinner.
That kind of systems thinking, the kind rooted in empathy, would shape not just his work, but his next big idea.
The Birth of BLOSSOMS
The thing about big ideas is that they often start small. In Larson’s case, it was a school in rural China. A teacher was using recorded video lessons from a distant university. Students watched intently. The teacher paused the tape to ask questions. That moment, simple but powerful, stayed with him.
Back at MIT, he and Liz Murray, an educator with a deep commitment to global learning, turned that spark into something far more ambitious: BLOSSOMS. Short for Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies, BLOSSOMS is exactly what it sounds like, a way to blend high-quality digital content with local, interactive teaching.
But it was not just a content dump. Each BLOSSOMS lesson was co-designed with educators around the world. Teachers didn’t just play the videos, they paused them, added cultural context, sparked debates. It was MIT-quality science education, adapted in real time, from Tunisia to Thailand.
Liz took the lead on building those global partnerships, shaping training programs, and localizing content to fit diverse classrooms. Together, she and Larson built a model that was not about broadcasting knowledge, it was about building learning communities.
At a time when many were trying to scale education by removing the teacher, they did the opposite: they made the teacher central.
BLOSSOMS grew fast. It reached schools across more than 20 countries. And it didn’t stop with videos. It grew into a movement, one that respected teachers, empowered students, and made world-class learning feel possible, even without world-class infrastructure.
In a world obsessed with tech-first solutions, Liz and Larson proved something else: the future of education isn’t about replacing humans. It’s about equipping them to do what they do best.
Systems Thinking in the Age of Uncertainty
You can’t predict a pandemic. But you can be ready for it, if you know how to think in systems. That’s something Larson’s been teaching for decades.
From modeling hospital surge capacity to simulating disease spread, his work during COVID was not a career shift. It was an extension of what he’s always done, applying systems thinking to real-life messiness. But now, the world is finally catching up.
In 2015, MIT launched the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and Larson was there from day one. It was the perfect convergence of everything he stood for: interdisciplinary work, data-informed decision-making, and real-world impact.
In 2025, he put his money, and legacy, where his heart was. With Liz by his side, he funded the Richard C. Larson Distinguished Professorship in Data, Systems, and Society. It was not just a title. It was a torch, meant to empower future leaders who’d use data not just for analysis, but for action.
He also published a book: Model Thinking for Everyday Life. It’s not for academics. It’s for anyone who wants to navigate a chaotic world with a little more clarity. His message? You don’t need a PhD to think clearly. You need curiosity, structure, and empathy.
Whether it’s pandemic planning or smart infrastructure, Larson’s approach remains the same: break down the problem, build the model, make it human.
Because the best models are not just mathematically elegant. They are useful. And more than that, they are kind.
Legacy, Still in Motion
Most people slow down in their eighties. Richard Larson is not most people.
He’s still lecturing. Still publishing. Still tweaking models that help governments deliver vaccines, schools design hybrid systems, and hospitals plan for the next unknown. And Liz? Still right there, grounding big ideas in the realities of learners across the globe.
What makes their story unique isn’t the volume of accomplishments. It’s how deliberately connected it all is. A boy fascinated by cities becomes a man building better ones. A teacher on a mission to reach remote classrooms finds a partner who can scale it. Together, they have woven math, empathy, education, and action into a single thread.
It’s not about numbers. It’s not about titles. It’s about impact, slow, steady, and deeply rooted.
Larson once said, “The value of a model is not in how perfect it is, but in how useful it becomes.” The same could be said for lives. His work was not perfect. But it’s been immensely useful, to students, to cities, to strangers standing in lines they barely notice.
And that, really, is the point. To make something so thoughtful, so helpful, so quietly brilliant, that most people never even notice it was designed at all.
Richard and Liz made that their mission.
And they are still at it.