*First Annual George Dantzig Seminar*
Semidefinite Programming
Michel X. Goemans
M.I.T.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
4:30 - 5:30 PM (Refreshments will be served at 4:15pm)
David Packard Building, Room 101
Abstract:
George Dantzig, one of the fathers of linear programming, was keenly
aware of the power and limitations of linear programming. In the
last few decades, semidefinite programming has emerged as one natural
extension and generalization of linear programming, sharing with it
duality, efficient algorithms, and a host of applications spanning
control theory, statistics, combinatorial optimization, robust
optimization, etc. In this talk, I will give an overview of this area,
highlighting especially its importance for combinatorial optimization.
Bio:
Michel Goemans is the Leighton Family Professor of Applied Mathematics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a faculty member of
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and
of MIT Operations Research Center (ORC). He has held an Adjunct
Professorship at the University of Waterloo, a Professorship at the
University of Louvain and a visiting Professorship at RIMS, Kyoto.
His research --- in the areas of discrete algorithms and combinatorial
optimization --- has been rewarded by several prizes, in particular the
2000 AMS-MPS Fulkerson Prize and twice the SIAM Optimization prize. He
has been an invited speaker at many conferences, including the
International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998. He has been on the
program committee of several major theoretical computer science
conferences, including as chair of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Theory of
Computing. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sloan Foundation Fellow.
Operations Research Colloquia: http://or.stanford.edu/oras_seminars.html