Citation
The 2015 recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society Khachiyan Prize, for this life-time achievements in the area of optimization, is Jean Bernard Lasserre. Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Jean Lasserre has made deep and fundamental contributions to a variety of areas of optimization. Overall, Lasserre has published over 150 influential papers, as well as eight books.
In particular, Lasserre has been a pioneer in the field of polynomial and semi-algebraic optimization, highlighted by his seminal 2001 paper "Global optimization with polynomials and the problem of moments" (SIOPT 11, 796-817) and culminated in his 2015 monograph Introduction to Polynomial and Semi-Algebraic Optimization (Cambridge University Press). He was the first to introduce the moment-SOS hierarchy (also known as the "Lasserre hierarchy"), which has become a major tool in this area with numerous applications in fields such as functional analysis, probability, statistics, and theoretical computer science. His books have made important contributions to diverse areas of applied and theoretical operations research, including control of Markov processes, control theory, production planning, scheduling, and optimization modeling. Most recently, Lasserre has produced deep fundamental results connecting discrete and continuous linear optimization with algebraic geometry which he summarized in his book Linear and Integer Programming vs Linear Integration and Counting, Springer-Verlag, 2009.
Jean Lasserre's extensive professional activities include service on editorial boards of major optimization journals, and many plenary talks in international conferences and workshops. He is a SIAM fellow, and a recipient of the 2009 Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization.
Selection committee
Ilan Adler (chair), Mike Ball, Don Goldfarb, Werner Römisch