The John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is awarded annually to an individual who has made fundamental and sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences.
Operations research, often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decision-making. It is considered to be a subfield of mathematical sciences. The term management science is occasionally used as a synonym.
Mathematical optimization or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfields: discrete optimization and continuous optimization. Optimization problems arise in all quantitative disciplines from computer science and engineering to operations research and economics, and the development of solution methods has been of interest in mathematics for centuries.
Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.
Stochastic control or stochastic optimal control is a sub field of control theory that deals with the existence of uncertainty either in observations or in the noise that drives the evolution of the system. The system designer assumes, in a Bayesian probability-driven fashion, that random noise with known probability distribution affects the evolution and observation of the state variables. Stochastic control aims to design the time path of the controlled variables that performs the desired control task with minimum cost, somehow defined, despite the presence of this noise. The context may be either discrete time or continuous time.
Yu-Chi "Larry" Ho is a Chinese-American mathematician, control theorist, and a professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Jan Hendrik van Schuppen is a Dutch mathematician and Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Vrije Universiteit, known for his contributions in the field of systems theory, particularly on control theory and system identification, on probability, and on a number of related practical applications.
Material theory is the sub-specialty within operations research and operations management that is concerned with the design of production/inventory systems to minimize costs: it studies the decisions faced by firms and the military in connection with manufacturing, warehousing, supply chains, spare part allocation and so on and provides the mathematical foundation for logistics. The inventory control problem is the problem faced by a firm that must decide how much to order in each time period to meet demand for its products. The problem can be modeled using mathematical techniques of optimal control, dynamic programming and network optimization. The study of such models is part of inventory theory.
Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.
Advances in Difference Equations is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal covering research on difference equations, published by Springer Open.
Mathematical finance, also known as quantitative finance and financial mathematics, is a field of applied mathematics, concerned with mathematical modeling of financial markets.
Immanuel Bomze is an Austrian mathematician. In his Ph.D. thesis, he completely classified all possible flows of the generalized Lotka–Volterra dynamics on the plane, employing equivalence of this dynamics to the 3-type replicator equation.
Darinka Dentcheva is a Bulgarian-American mathematician, noted for her contributions to convex analysis, stochastic programming, and risk-averse optimization.
Bruce Edward Hajek is a Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He does research in communication networking, auction theory, stochastic analysis, combinatorial optimization, machine learning, information theory, and bioinformatics.
Ji-Feng Zhang was born in Shandong, China. He is currently the vice-chair of the technical board of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), the vice-president of the Systems Engineering Society of China (SESC), the vice-president of the Chinese Association of Automation (CAA), the chair of the technical committee on Control Theory (CAA), and the editor-in-chief for both All About Systems and Control and the Journal of Systems Science and Mathematical Sciences.
Vivek Shripad Borkar is an Indian electrical engineer, mathematician and an Institute chair professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He is known for introducing analytical paradigm in stochastic optimal control processes and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He also holds elected fellowships of The World Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Indian National Academy of Engineering and the American Mathematical Society. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1992. He received the TWAS Prize of the World Academy of Sciences in 2009.
Richard H. Stockbridge is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His contributions to research primarily involve stochastic control theory, optimal stopping and mathematical finance. Most notably, alongside Professors Thomas G. Kurtz, Kurt Helmes, and Chao Zhu, he developed the methodology of using linear programming to solve stochastic control problems.
Michel Bierlaire is a Belgian-Swiss applied mathematician specialized in transportation modeling and optimization. He is a professor at EPFL and the head of the Transport and Mobility Laboratory.
Werner Römisch is a German mathematician, professor emeritus at the Humboldt University of Berlin, most known for his pioneer work in the field of stochastic programming.
Eugene A. Feinberg is an American mathematician and distinguished professor of applied mathematics and statistics at Stony Brook University. He is noted for his work in probability theory, real analysis, and Markov decision processes.
