Yinyu Ye (left), Farid Alizadeh, and Sanjay Mehrotra.
Citation
Farid Alizadeh laid the groundwork for the field of semidefinite programming (SDP), which has grown quickly and steadily over the past 25 years. He established the fundamental connection between interior-point methods for linear programming (LP) and their application to solve SDPs. He developed wide-ranging-applications of SDP to combinatorial optimization problems; making a long-lasting impact to the field of optimization. He deepened the understanding of complementarity and non-degeneracy issues of SDP. He also considered fundamental issues in the analysis and development of algorithms for SDP and developed the so-called AHO (Alizadeh-Haeberly-Overton) Newton direction in primal-dual path-following algorithms for SDP, which was an important step towards the development of the high-quality SDP software that we enjoy today. In addition, he also made several important contributions to second order cone programming (SOCP), and the theory and applications of nonnegative polynomials.
Video recording
Farid Alizadeh was invited to give a short talk (about 15 minutes) at the INFORMS Annual Meeting. Here is the link to the recording of the talk.
Selection committee
Yinyu Ye (chair), Garud N. Iyengar, Jean B. Lasserre, Zhi-Quan (Tom) Luo