William John Cook (born October 18, 1957 in New Jersey) is an American operations researcher and mathematician, and Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.
He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 for theoretical and computational contributions to discrete optimization. [1]
He is known for his work on the traveling salesman problem and is one of the authors of the Concorde TSP Solver.
Cook did his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, graduating in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. After earning a master's degree in operations research from Stanford University in 1980, he moved to the University of Waterloo, where he earned a Ph.D. in combinatorics and optimization in 1983 under the supervision of U. S. R. Murty. [2] [3] After postdoctoral studies at the University of Bonn, he joined the Cornell University faculty in 1985, moved to Columbia University in 1987, and in 1988 joined the research staff of Bell Communications Research. In 1994 he returned to academia as John von Neumann Professor at the University of Bonn, and in 1996 he moved to Rice University as Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics. In 2002 he took his position at Georgia Tech. [2] In January 2013, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as the John Swanson Professor of Industrial Engineering, before returning to the University of Waterloo in June 2013 as a professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, and subsequently University Professor. [2] From 2018-2020 he worked at Johns Hopkins University as a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.
He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Mathematical Programming Computation (since 2008), and the former editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming (Series B from 1993 to 2003, and Series A from 2003 to 2007). [2]
In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. [4] He won the Beale–Orchard-Hays Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society in 2000, [5] and his book The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study won the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize of INFORMS in 2007. [6]
He became a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009, and of INFORMS in 2010. [2] He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011. [1] In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [7]
The travelling salesman problem asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science and operations research.
Václav (Vašek) Chvátal is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
The Concorde TSP Solver is a program for solving the travelling salesman problem. It was written by David Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, Vašek Chvátal, and William J. Cook, in ANSI C, and is freely available for academic use.
The Frederick W. Lanchester Prize is an Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences prize given for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English. It is named after Frederick W. Lanchester.
Ellis Lane Johnson is the Professor Emeritus and the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
Roger Jean-Baptiste Robert Wets is a "pioneer" in stochastic programming and a leader in variational analysis who publishes as Roger J-B Wets. His research, expositions, graduate students, and his collaboration with R. Tyrrell Rockafellar have had a profound influence on optimization theory, computations, and applications. Since 2009, Wets has been a distinguished research professor at the mathematics department of the University of California, Davis.
Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text "Convex Analysis" (1970), which has been cited more than 27,000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Nimrod Megiddo is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a research scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His interests include optimization, algorithm design and analysis, game theory, and machine learning. He was a comparatively early researcher to propose a solution to the Bounding sphere and Smallest-circle problem.
BARON is a computational system for solving non-convex optimization problems to global optimality. Purely continuous, purely integer, and mixed-integer nonlinear problems can be solved by the solver. Linear programming (LP), nonlinear programming (NLP), mixed integer programming (MIP), and mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) are supported. BARON is available under the AIMMS, AMPL, GAMS, JuMP, MATLAB, Pyomo, and YALMIP modeling environments on a variety of platforms. The GAMS/BARON solver is also available on the NEOS Server.
George Lann Nemhauser is an American operations researcher, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former president of the Operations Research Society of America.
Alexander (Lex) Schrijver is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of discrete mathematics and optimization at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Since 1993 he has been co-editor in chief of the journal Combinatorica.
Egon Balas was an applied mathematician and a professor of industrial administration and applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and did fundamental work in developing integer and disjunctive programming.
Laurence Alexander Wolsey is an English mathematician working in the field of integer programming. He is a former president and research director of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the engineering school of the same university.
Michel Louis Balinski was an applied mathematician, economist, operations research analyst and political scientist. As a Polish-American, educated in the United States, he lived and worked primarily in the United States and France. He was known for his work in optimisation, convex polyhedra, stable matching, and the theory and practice of electoral systems, jury decision, and social choice. He was Directeur de Recherche de classe exceptionnelle (emeritus) of the C.N.R.S. at the École Polytechnique (Paris). He was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by INFORMS in 2013.
Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and control theorist. He is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor in Electrical Engineering, and professor by courtesy in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He is also affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME).
William R. Pulleyblank is a Canadian and American operations researcher. He is a professor of operations research at the United States Military Academy, where he also holds the Class of 1950 Chair of Advanced Technology.
Gérard Pierre Cornuéjols is the IBM University Professor of Operations Research in the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. His research interests include facility location, integer programming, balanced matrices, and perfect graphs.
David L. Applegate is an American computer scientist known for his research on the traveling salesperson problem.
Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).
In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation is a book on the travelling salesman problem, by William J. Cook, published in 2012 by the Princeton University Press, with a paperback reprint in 2014. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has suggested its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
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