Hooked on Optimization

The first recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society Khachiyan Prize, to be awarded to an individual or a team for life-time achievements in the area of optimization, is George Nemhauser, the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. During a remarkable academic career of so far about 50 years George Nemhauser has grown into one of the world's foremost experts in discrete optimization and has become one of the most recognized members of the INFORMs community. The basis for his outstanding position as an OR scientist are his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of integer programming and combinatorial optimization. His integer programming books have guided the field for more than thirty years, each introducing a host of new techniques for handling IP models in theory and practice. George’s nearly two hundred research papers in the field are unmatched in their breadth of coverage. George has shown a unique ability to find, solve, and present applied work in Operations Research; but first and foremost he is a superb contributor to the theory underlying optimization techniques. This is evident from his publications throughout his whole career, starting with traveling-salesman-problem work in 1962 and continuing through his recent papers on piecewise-linear optimization. Fundamental models and techniques covered by George include Lagrangian optimization, dynamic programming, capital budgeting, set partitioning, cutting planes, branch-and-price, transportation problems, graph coloring, vertex packing, submodular functions, facility location, cutting stock, stochastic programming, and so on. State-of-the-art software relies heavily on the use of cutting planes, and George Nemhauser was an early proponent of this approach. MINTO, a code he developed in collaboration with Savelsbergh and Sigismondi, was a precursor of modern branch-and-cut codes. George Nemhauser has served ORSA as council member, president, and editor of Operations Research, and he is past chair of the Mathematical Programming Society. He is the founding editor of Operations Research Letters, and co-editor of Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science. George has served various governmental agencies, including the NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Research Council (NRC). His honors and awards include the Kimball Medal, the Lanchester Prize (twice awarded), Morse lecturer of ORSA, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering.Runtime: 19:06 minutesInteger programming is addictive. I got hooked more than forty years ago and I'm still an addict. There are many fun challenges and no indication that the rate of progress has diminished. In this talk I'll tell a little of my story and conclude with what I think are current opportunities