The 2013 Newton Institute Programme on polynomial optimization

The rapidly growing field of polynomial optimisation (PO) is concerned with optimisation problems in which the objective and constraint functions are all polynomials. There are applications of PO in a surprisingly wide variety of contexts, including, for example, operational research, statistics, applied probability, quantitative finance, theoretical computer science and various branches of engineering and the physical sciences. Not only that, but current research on PO is remarkably inter-disciplinary in nature, involving researchers from all of the above-mentioned disciplines, together with several branches of mathematics including graph theory, numerical analysis, algebraic geometry, commutative algebra and moment theory