News Release

Lehigh University professor elected SIAM 2018 Fellow

Tamas Terlaky from the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at Lehigh University has been elected to the Fellows Program of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Grant and Award Announcement

Lehigh University

Tamás Terlaky, Lehigh University

image: This is Tamás Terlaky, Industrial Systems and Engineering at Lehigh University. view more 

Credit: Lehigh University

A professor from the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at Lehigh University has been elected to the Fellows Program of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Tamas Terlaky, the George N. and Soteria Kledaras '87 Endowed Chair professor, was recognized for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of optimization and exemplary service to the optimization community.

SIAM, founded in 1952, fosters the development of applied mathematical and computational methodologies in order to solve real-world problems.

"It is heartwarming to see my friends and colleagues take the time and effort to nominate me for such a great recognition, and for SIAM to value my contributions," Terlaky said. "Membership in the distinguished club of SIAM fellows comes with accolades but also the duty to humbly serve our community."

Terlaky will be honored for his achievements at SIAM's annual meeting in Portland, Oregon in July.

Terlaky and his team made headlines last year while working alongside the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to produce an optimization model for inmate assignment. The Inmate Assignment Decision Support System (IADSS) streamlines the assignment of inmates to the state's 25 correctional institutions and has been credited with saving the state millions of dollars. The team won the prestigious Daniel H. Wagner Prize in 2017 for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.

SIAM is an international community of over 14,000 individual members and 500 institutional members from more than 100 countries. With the inclusion of its latest publication, the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS), the organization now issues 17 peer-reviewed journals and holds conferences and events throughout the year.

Terlaky is an active contributor to SIAM. Since January 2017, he has served as the Chair of the SIAM Optimization subdivision as well as Co-Chair of the tri-annual 2020 SIAM Optimization Conference in Hong-Kong. In May 2017, along with colleagues Miguel F. Anjos of Polytechnique Montreal and Shabbir Ahmed of Georgia Institute of Technology, Terlaky produced a new textbook on optimization and engineering. The text, Advances and Trends in Optimization with Engineering Applications, is part of a prestigious series on optimization published by SIAM and the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS).

In February 2018, Terlaky presented the keynote speech at the KAUST Research Workshop on Optimization and Big Data in Saudi Arabia. This summer, Terlaky will deliver several invited lectures, including a plenary talk at the IFIP TC7 2018 Conference on System Modeling and Optimization in Essen, Germany and a keynote speech at the EURO 2018 Conference in Valencia, Spain.

Prior to his appointment at Lehigh University, where he served as department chair of Industrial Systems and Engineering from 2008 to 2017, Terlaky taught at Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary; Delft University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands and McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. At McMaster, he also served as the founding director of the School of Computational Engineering and Science.

Terlaky has published four books, edited more than 10 books and journal special issues and published over 180 research papers. Topics include theoretical and algorithmic foundations of mathematical optimization (for example, invention of the criss-cross method and its generalizations to oriented matroid programming), design and analysis of large classes of interior point methods, computational optimization, worst case examples of the central path, duality theory, sensitivity analysis, nuclear reactor core reloading optimization, oil refinery and VLSI design optimization, robust radiation therapy treatment optimization and inmate assignment optimization.

Terlaky is founding Honorary Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Optimization and Engineering. He has served as associate editor of 10 journals and has served as conference chair, conference organizer and distinguished invited speaker at conferences throughout the world. He was general Chair of the INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting, a former Chair of INFORMS' Optimization Society and Chair of the ICCOPT Steering Committee of the Mathematical Optimization Society. He is a Fellow of the Fields Institute and Fellow of INFORMS. He received the MITACS Mentorship Award for his distinguished graduate student supervisory record and the Award of Merit of the Canadian Operations Research Society. In November 2017 he received the Wagner Prize of INFORMS and the Egerváry Award of the Hungarian Operations Research Society.

Terlaky's research interests includes high performance optimization algorithms, optimization modeling and its applications.

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Key Links:

Faculty profile: Tamas Terlaky

Department of Industrial Systems and Engineering, Lehigh University

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

SIAM Fellows: Class of 2018

Article: Terlaky produces new textbook on optimization and engineering


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