The Herman Goldstine Fellowship provides scientists of outstanding ability
an opportunity to advance their scholarship as resident members of the
Mathematical Sciences Department at the T.J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights, NY. Recipients of this fellowship conduct research in pure
and applied mathematics, as well as theoretical and exploratory computer
science. Past and present activities of fellowship holders include work on
sequential and parallel algorithms, cryptography, numerical analysis,
differential equations, logic design, computer music, dynamic systems and
approximation theory. The fellowship lasts for one to two years with stipend
expected to be between $95,000 and $115,000, depending on the area and
length of experience. One fellowship is awarded following a world-wide
competition; the only restriction is that candidates must be within five
years from their PhD.
All three components of the ACO Program are ranked in the top 10 by the
US News and World Report
For the second year in a row, the three components of the ACO Program were
ranked in the top 10 by the US News and World Report. ISyE was ranked No.
1, Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics was ranked No. 7 and Computer
Science Theory was ranked No. 9 in the 2009
graduate rankings.
Atish Das Sarma wins Best Paper Award at PODS 2008
Third-year ACO student Atish Das Sarma has
been notified that his paper "Estimating PageRank on Graph Streams",
coauthored with Sreenivas Gollapudi and Rina Panigrahy, will be winning
the Best Paper Award at the 27th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on
Principles of Database Systems (PODS 2008)
www.sigmod08.org to be held June 9-11, 2008 in
Vancouver, Canada.
Adam Marcus (ACO'08) wins the inaugural 2008 SIAM Denes Konig Prize
Adam Marcus, a 4th year ACO student, has just been notified that he will receive
the inaugural 2008
SIAM Denes Konig Prize
for a junior researcher for
outstanding research in an area of discrete mathematics for his two papers:
M. Klazar and A. Marcus, Extensions of the linear bound in the
Furedi-Hajnal conjecture, Adv. in Appl. Math. 38 (2006), 258-266, and
A. Marcus and G. Tardos, Excluded permutation matrices and the
Stanley-Wilf conjecture, J. Comb. Theory Ser. A 107 (2004), 153-160.
The award will be presented at the SIAM Conference on Discrete
Mathematics in Vermont in June.
Bill Cook wins the Lanchester Prize
Bill Cook with coauthors David L. Applegate, Robert E. Bixby and Vasek Chvatal
were awarded the
Frederick W. Lanchester Prize of INFORMS at an award ceremony
at the annual INFORMS meeting in November 2007. The citation reads:
The 2007 Lanchester Prize of INFORMS is awarded to David L. Applegate,
Robert E. Bixby, Vasek Chvatal and William J. Cook for their book.
The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2006.
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is to find the least expensive way to visit a collection of cities and return to the beginning. This simply stated problem combined with its seeming intractable solution has, over the past century, made the TSP the defining problem for computational optimization and even for computational science in general. While the TSP is now well-known in popular culture as well as in OR/MS, its history, the applications beyond the routing of itinerant vendors, and the variety of solution methodologies had not been assembled until now. Applegate, Bixby, Chvatal and Cook's book The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study combines the history, the applications and the most advanced methods for solution in a definitive treatment of this definitive problem.
In presenting solution methods, the book describes in clear and instructive terms how to build efficient procedures for the basic optimization mechanisms of linear programming, branch-and-bound, cutting planes, and iterative improvement. The authors then show how to combine these myriad processes into a powerful optimization machine capable of solving to optimality problems with tens of thousands of cities. They also provide challenges for improvements and sources for new directions to the TSP and other large combinatorial problems. To allow future researchers the chance to examine and build on their work directly, the authors have made publicly available their entire computer code.
Besides providing a comprehensive view of all that is involved in solving
the TSP, the book's flowing narrative blends the pieces together in a
steady progression that captivates the reader. In describing the
latest applications, such as gene sequencing, data mining and X-ray
crystallography, the book also shows the reach of OR/MS into multiple new
domains. In all respects, The Traveling Salesman Problem: A
Computational Study represents the best of OR/MS history, present,
and future.
Eric Vigoda wins the Fulkerson prize
Eric Vigoda won the
2006 Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize for his paper titled
"A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix
with nonnegative entries", co-authored with
Mark Jerrum
at the University of Edinburgh and
Alistair Sinclair at UC Berkeley.
The Fulkerson Prize is, along with the Polya prize, one of two most
prestigious awards given in the area of Discrete Mathematics.
The Fulkerson prize is sponsored jointly by the
Mathematical Programming
Society and the
American Mathematical Society,
and is awarded every
three years at the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming
The permanent of a matrix is currently a well-studied combinatorial problem with applications in many fields, as it corresponds to the number of perfect matchings of a bipartite graph. For example in physics, computing the permanent is central to the study of the Dimer and Ising Models, although the exact computation of the permanent is intractable. Mathematicians began studying the permanent about two centuries ago, partly because of its superficial similarity to the determinant, which is a much easier problem.
Arkadi Nemirovski delivered a plenary address at the
International Congress of Mathematicians,
Robin Thomas an invited section talk
Every four years mathematicians from all continents gather at the
International
Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to celebrate recent advances in their
field,
to award the so-called
Fields medals ("the Nobel prize of mathematics"),
the
Nevanlinna prize (same in Computer Science) and the newly-established
Gauss Prize (in applied mathematics) and to
hear each other report on their recent research.
The congress is run by the
International Mathematical Union, and is planned
years in advance.
The program committee selects about twenty mathematicians from all over the world
to deliver a plenary address, one that does not run in parallel with any other
event so that all delegates to the congress can attend it.
Obviously, it is a great honor bestowed upon very few mathematicians
to be selected for such presentation.
In addition to the plenary talks the program committee invites about 160 mathematicians to present 45 minute sectional talks. As the name suggests, these run in parallel sections according to specific areas, but are nevertheless supposed to be accessible to a general mathematics audience. An invitation to a sectional talk also represents a significant recognition of a mathematician's standing in the research community.
The most recent ICM took place in Madrid, Spain, in August 2006, with almost
4,000 people in attendance. We are pleased to report that our own
Arkadi Nemirovski
delivered one of the twenty invited addresses
on
"Advances in convex optimization: conic programming".
In addition to Arkadi's plenary the ACO program was also represented in
Section 14, Combinatorics, where
Robin Thomas delivered an invited 45 minute talk
on
Pfaffian orientations of graphs, a subject he has been working on for many years now
with several coauthors, including Serguei Norine (ACO'05).
ACO faculty deliver two plenary and one semiplenary lecture
at the Mathematical Programming Symposium
The
19th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming was held in
Rio de Janeiro, July 30 to August 4, 2006. The ISMP takes place once every
three years. The Rio meeting was the second time it has been held outside
of North America and Europe.
ACO was well represented at the ISMP in Rio.
Arkadi Nemirovski and
Alex Shapiro
delivered plenary lectures (this accounted for two of the total of three
plenary lectures given at the meeting),
Vijay Vazirani delivered a semi-plenary
lecture, and
Ellis Johnson was one of three speakers honoring George Dantzig
in the meeting's opening session. In addition,
Eric Vigoda was honored as
one of the Fulkerson Prize winners in the awards ceremony.
Paul Wollan (ACO'05) wins a Humboldt Fellowship
Paul Wollan defended his dissertation entitled
"Extremal functions for graph linkages and rooted minors"
in December 2005, and in January
2006 started a one year postdoctoral position in the Department of Combinatorics
and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, Canada, working with
Bertrand Guenin,
winner of the 2003 Fulkerson prize.
In many respects the C&O department is a sister institution to our ACO program.
Even as a graduate student Paul became interested in matroid theory, more precisely
in its structural aspects, a topic he is now pursuing full time with Bertrand
at the University of Waterloo.
In August 2006, during a short visit to Atlanta, Paul was notified that he was
awarded an
Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to work at the University of
Hamburg, Germany, with
Reinhard Diestel, best known for his authoritative textbook on Graph Theory,
also used in the ACO curriculum.
The initial appointment is for one year, and is renewable for another year. It also includes a commitment for life to support shorter visits to Germany in the future, should Paul desire to continue his collaboration with German scientists.
The Humboldt Research Fellowships are awarded to "highly qualified, foreign scientists and scholars of all nationalities and disciplines holding doctorates, aged up to 40, from abroad for a long-term research stay in Germany (up to 600 fellowships per annum)". They are offered world-wide on a competitive basis. The most important criteria for selection are the applicant's international publications to date and the quality and feasibility of the research proposal.
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