INFORMS Optimization Awards

The INFORMS Optimization Society just announced their 2010 awards.

I [Nick Sahinidis, President of the Society] am delighted to announce the winners of the 2010 INFORMS Optimization Society Prizes:
– George L. Nemhauser, winner of the first Khachiyan Prize for his life-time achievements in the field of optimization
– Zhi-Quan (Tom) Luo, winner of the 2010 Farkas Prize for his outstanding contributions to the field of optimization
– Anthony Man-Cho So, winner of the 2010 Prize for Young Researchers for his paper “Moment inequalities for sums of random matrices and their applications to optimization,” Mathematical Programming, DOI: 10.1007/s10107-009-0330-5
– Shiqian Ma, winner of the 2010 Student Paper Prize for his paper “Fast multiple splitting algorithms for convex optimization,” co-authored with Don Goldfarb.

A very impressive group!  I have worked with Nemhauser, and he and I are co-owners of a small sports scheduling firm.  I’d like to think sports scheduling helped a little bit in getting this award, but since our most cited paper together is only his 14th most cited paper (it is my 5th most cited, both stats according to Google scholar), I guess he is really getting it for his work on more fundamental issues in integer programming (and other areas!).

Congrats to all the winners.  You can find out more about their work, and even see them all together at the upcoming INFORMS meeting:

The detailed award citations for this year’s prizes can be found at http://optimization.society.informs.org/prizes.html.  The four prize winners will present their work at a special session at the INFORMS meeting in Austin, scheduled for November 7th from 13:30 to 15:00 and entitled “Optimization Society Prizes.”