Egon Balas (left), András Prékopa, and Jon Lee.
Citation
The 2012 recipient of the Leonid Khachiyan Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society, awarded for lifetime achievements in the area of optimization, is András Prékopa of Rutgers University.
András Prékopa was one of the pioneers of stochastic programming and has been a major contributor to its literature. In the 1960's, he amended one of the three basic model types of the discipline, chance-constrained programming, by taking into account stochastic dependence among the random variables involved. One of his main results in the area concerns the convexity theory of probabilistically constrained stochastic optimization problems. He introduced the concept of logarithmic concave measures and provided several fundamental theorems on logconcavity, which supplied proofs for the convexity of a wide class of probabilistically constrained stochastic programming problems. These results had impact far beyond the area of mathematical programming, as they found applications in physics, statistics, convex geometry and other fields. In addition to these theoretical developments, Prékopa gave the first algorithm, as well as several subsequent ones, for solving stochastic programs with probabilistic constraints. He also formulated models in this class for numerous real-world applications that he and his coworkers solved, often reaching interesting practical conclusions.
Professor Prékopa is the author of one of the major graduate textbooks on stochastic programming and has published more than 160 papers in scientific journals. In his long career he supervised over 50 doctoral dissertations, with many of his students going on to distinguished academic careers. Besides his work on stochastic programming, he has had an ongoing interest in the historical contributions of Hungarian mathematicians, including Bolyai and Farkas.
Professor Prékopa founded the Department of Operations Research at Eötvös University, Budapest and has been on the faculty of Rugters University since 1985. He was the founder and first chair of the Committee on Stochastic Programming of the Mathematical Programming Society. His extensive professional service includes serving on many conference committees and journal boards. Professor Prékopa has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, being named a Fellow of the Econometric Society and receiving the EURO Gold Medal.
Selection committee
Kurt Anstreicher (Chair), Egon Balas, Claude Lemaréchal, Éva Tardos.