| Tony Guttman | |
| Tony Guttman | |
| Siegfried Schaible | |
| Sever Dragomir | |
| Valeria Ruggiero | |
| Liqun Qi | |
| M.J.D. Powell (University of Cambridge, England). | |
| Klaus Schittkowski | |
| Akiko Yoshise | |
| Akihisa Tamura | |
| Shinji Mizuno | |
| Nimrod Megiddo | |
| Vladimir Demyanov | |
| David Gao | |
| G.A. Maugin | |
| G. Maier | |
| Y. Sergeyev | |
| P.Pardalos | |
| S. Butenko | |
| Francisco Facchinei | |
| Klaus Schittkowski | |
| Alex Rubinov | |
| Klaus Schittkowski | |
| Franco Giannessi | |
| Liqun Qi | |
| Klaus Schittkowski |
The Australian Research Council (ARC) has established Centres of Excellence to maintain and develop Australia's research output in four designated areas, Nano-Materials and Bio-Materials, Genome/Phenome Research, Complex/Intelligent Systems, and Photon Science and Technology. These Centres are also expected to generate economic, social and cultural benefits for Australia.
One such centre is the Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Modelling of Complex Systems, based at The University of Melbourne. The Centre has 13 Chief Investigators from The University of Melbourne, Australian National University, The University of New South Wales, The University of Queensland and La Trobe University, all of whom have international reputations for their research in applied mathematics and statistics. AMSI is also a collaborating partner.
The Centre's mission will be to stimulate research activity in mathematical and statistical modelling of complex systems. In doing so, the Centre will conduct research on criticality and phase change (e.g. in control of traffic queuing, and understanding catastrophic failure), Monte Carlo methods (e.g. in modelling financial systems), statistical modelling (e.g. in understanding telephone and internet traffic), dynamical systems (e.g. in meteorology, oceanography, and the behaviour of polymers and composite materials), risk modelling (e.g. in insurance, national security and health interventions), and advanced computation (e.g. to speed industrial design and to predict large-scale, long-term environmental impacts).
The Centre will also reinforce the importance of mathematics and statistics across the spectrum of Australia's scientific and technological development. To achieve this, the Centre will maintain an extensive and vigorous outreach program, encompassing educational institutions, commerce and industry, and the broader research community in Australia.
For further information, contact the Centre's Director, Professor Tony Guttmann at tonyg@ms.unimelb.edu.au
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The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) is a national collaborative venture to address some of the challenges facing the mathematical sciences in Australia. There are eight full partners, including some of Australia's premier research universities, and sixteen associate members. AMSI is based at The University of Melbourne's Parkville campus.
The need for a collaborative approach to improving the mathematical sciences base in Australia has become urgent. In recent times, the mathematical sciences in Australia have found themselves under considerable stress. This includes the loss of a significant number of experienced researchers to posts overseas with very little movement to Australia of similarly qualified people. The continued weakening of the mathematical sciences research base in Australia, compounded by a teacher supply crisis that is threatening the mathematics education of many young people, is a threat to Australia's economic and scientific future. As well as being fundamental to science, technology and innovation, advanced mathematical sciences are essential to security in both defence and financial sectors.
AMSI's mission is to become a nationally and internationally recognized centre for the mathematical sciences, providing service to its member institutions, improving the international competitiveness of Australian industry and organizations and enhancing the national level of school mathematics, by the provision and support of mathematical and statistical expertise.
Generally, AMSI seeks to build critical mass and visibility for mathematical services and research. It will promote collaboration among providers of mathematical services, other researchers, business, industry and education by:
In particular, four programs will be established to:
For further enquiries, visit AMSI's web site at http://www.amsi.org.au, or contact the Interim Director, Professor Garth Gaudry (garth@maths.unsw.edu.au), the Deputy Director, Professor Tony Guttmann (tonyg@ms.unimelb.edu.au) or the Executive Officer, Jan Thomas (J.Thomas@ms.unimelb.edu.au).
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As of February 2003 the Working Group on Generalized Convexity (WGGC) has grown to over 275 members in 40 countries. Since its inception at ISMP'1994 WGGC has brought together researchers with interest in generalizations of convexity/monotonicity and their uses in optimization, variational inequalities, equilibrium models, nonlinear analysis, etc.
In the last few years the increase in membership has been particularly significant in Asia. Since 2000 (the start of POP) invited session clusters at five major international conferences in the region were organized: APORS'2000 (Singapore), SJOM'2000 (Hong Kong), ICOOC'2001 (Tainan), ICOTA'2001 (Hong Kong), JSOM'2002 (Kyoto). Thanks are due to A.M.Rubinov, T.Tanaka, X.M.Yang, X.Q.Yang and J.C.Yao who each served as my 'local' co-organizers of one of these clusters.
In 2002 the 7th triennial International Symposium on Generalized Convexity/Monotonicity (GC7) was successfully held at the Hanoi Institute of Mathematics in Vietnam. A report on GC7 appeared in ORB7 (September 2002). The program of GC7 can be downloaded from the WGGC web page at www.genconv.org.
In 2003 WGGC session clusters are included in the program of the following POP-sponsored international conferences in the region:
OCA'2003 (The Third International Conference on Optimization and Control with Applications) in Chongqing/Chengdu/Jiuzhaigou, P.R.China on July 1-7;
NACA'2003 (The Third International Conference on Nonlinear Analysis and Convex Analysis) in Tokyo on August 25-29;
APORS'2003 (The Sixth International Conference of Asia Pacific Operations Research Societies) in New Delhi on December 8-10.
For a link to these three conferences and a list of the WGGC cluster chairs please see the Conference Area of the WGGC web page at www.genconv.org. We invite the readers of ORB working in generalized convexity/monotonicity to participate in one (or more) of these session clusters. Regarding the cluster at OCA and at NACA, please contact me at this time (siegfried.schaible@ucr.edu).
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In October 1998, together with some members of the mathematics group in the School of Communications and Informatics at Victoria University (Melbourne), I laid the foundations for building an international research group in mathematical inequalities and applications, the RGMIA (Research Group in Mathematical Inequalities & Applications) http://rgmia.vu.edu.au <http://rgmia.vu.edu.au/>
Within months of its initiation, the RGMIA began its own electronic preprint series, 'Research Report Collection' http://rgmia.vu.edu.au/reports.html .The copyright belongs to the authors who may publish the final version of the paper in a peer refereed journal.
The printed version of the Research Reports, sent to selected key members of the group, are exchanged with more than 70 international journals. The exchange scheme also keeps the mathematical and statistical groups within the School informed about the latest developments in their research areas. The mathematical journal holdings of VU's library are extensive and, therefore, the exchange enterprise scheme is an innovative solution to an on-going financial constraint.
After one year of fruitful experience with the RGMIA and its Research Report Collection, which is present in many web databases (see http://rgmia.vu.edu.au/links.html) we initiated our own international, peer refereed electronic journal, the Journal of Inequalities in Pure and Applied Mathematics, (JIPAM) http://jipam.vu.edu.au <http://jipam.vu.edu.au/> . This journal aims to foster and develop further growth in all areas of mathematics relating to inequalities. The journal accepts high quality papers containing original research results, survey articles of exceptional merit, short letters and notes. The journal recognizes the need for papers to be published in a timely fashion and, therefore, papers are refereed within 100 working days of submission. The journal is, for the moment, freely available on the Internet. The editorial board http://jipam.vu.edu.au/editors.html comprises 57 internationally recognized researchers - many of whom are world leaders in the their own fields.
The managerial board of RGMIA and JIPAM comprises the following members:
The following academics visited the RGMIA at VU group and conducted researches with the members of the group
Alex Rubinov,
Director, Center for Informatics and Applied
Optimization,
Professor of Mathematics, SITMS,
University of Ballarat,
P.O. Box 663, VIC 3353 Australia
fax: + 61 353 279 289
ph.: + 61 353 279 281
e-mail: a.rubinov@ballarat.edu.au
home page http://www.ballarat.edu.au/~arubinov/index.html
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For details click here.
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Today is March 19, 2003. I am just back from Nanjing. I found that ORB Issue 9 was already on the web. I am not sure if some memorial words for a young POP member can be added to this issue or not.
Actually, I received an e-mail from Professor Lutai Guan in Zhongshan University on March 13, that Bill K. Jam died. That day I had classes. Then Prof. Lianshen Zhang in Shanghai University (Prof. Lianshen Zhang is Shuzhong Zhang's father. POP people may know Shuzhong more) gave a seminar in our department, and we had dinner with him. On March 14 morning I went to Nanjing. Thus, only now I have time to write somethings for Bill. Tomorrow Alex may announce ORB issue 9. So I hope my few words on Bill can catch up the issue.
Bill was totally unknown and young. In December 2001, Kok Lay and I were awarded adjunct professorships of Zhongshan University. We accepted this, hoping to strengthen research and Ph.D. education collaboration with this important university in our neighbor city. We went to Guangzhou to accept the title, and to give a talk on our research. After my talk, several Ph.D. and master students of Prof. Lutai Guan surrounded me. One of them was Bill. Bill wished to join my research group on power system optimization, which is a collaboration plan with Professor Qiang Lu (an academician in Power Engineering) in Tsinghua University. Bill said that he had worked in computer companies and started graduate study recently. He said that he had energy and motivation to go to research, and wished to enter the Palace of Science. Prof. Guan approved Bill's plan later and told me Bill formally started his Ph.D. life. Bill sent me e-mails to describe his preparation: he bought some books on power engineering and optimization, and started to study.
Last year, Dr. Xiaojiao Tong moved to Shenzhen, to join the collaboration research project of Prof. Lu, Kok Lay and me. I asked Xiaojiao to contact Bill. In fact, Bill's home is in Shenzhen. Xiaojiao later told me that she had not received any response from Bill. I was puzzled as Bill had been so determined to go to this research.
Later in the last year, I received a message from Prof. Guan, to inform me Bill was found to have cancer, and had to interrupted his Ph.D. study. I was shocked as Bill seemed to be the strongest among Prof. Guan's students.
Now, on March 13, I heard the bad news from Prof. Guan. Actually, Bill died by cancer on March 11, 2003. Bill's Chinese name is Qian Jiang.
I was sad that an aspiring youth died before he could achieve his dream.
Last month, one of my university-time classmates in Shanghai died by cancer. He was the Director of Shanghai Railway Research Institute. Our classmates were sad that he passed when he was contributing his wisdom and energy to our country. One of my university-time classmates, now in USA, said that he would study medicine to cure cancer if there were a next life.
Now, I heard the news that Bill died even before he could start his academic career.
What we can do? Anyway, the people alive will still struggle to make the life happy and significant.
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I spoke on this subject at the First International Conference on Optimization Methods and Software, which was held in Hangzhou, China last December. I am delighted by the numerical results that I presented, because they suggest that high accuracy can be achieved in some unconstrained calculations using only of magnitude $n$ values of the objective function, where $n$ is the number of variables. I have now completed a paper on this work for the conference proceedings (see here) This paper is also available on the web at the address http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk. There one should click on Numerical Analysis and then on Reports, in order to reach the report that has the number DAMTP 2003/NA03. The abstract of the paper is as follows (see here)
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As many of your know, I am developing numerical software since more than 20 years. There are a few brandnew versions of the more popular codes I would like to announce.
a) NLPQLP: There is a new Fortran version of my SQP code NLPQL for solving nonlinear, constrained optimization problems, called NLPQLP, which is designed to run also under distributed systems. This is possible by parallizing the line search. A report with some numerical results can be downloaded from my home page. The old version, NLPQL, became meanwhile quite popular and is widely used in industry and academia ( http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/nlpqlp.htm).
b) NLP TEST EXAMPLES: The Fortran source codes of 306 test problems of the two Springer Lecture Notes I published a couple of years ago, can be downloaded from my home page together with a report and a test frame. A decision is made which of the test runs is successful, and performance results are evaluated. With the default tolerances given, all problems can be solved successfully by the code NLPQLP ( http://www.uni- bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/downloads.htm#NLP%20test %20examples).
c) PDEFIT V3.9: This is a Fortran program to solve data fitting problems in systems of one-dimensional linear or nonlinear partial differential equations. Equations that do not depend on time derivatives, are treated as algebraic ones. The system may possess coupled ordinary differential algebraic equations, different integration areas, additional equality or inequality constraints and many other features. The brandnew version of December 2002 contains new options that are not available in the software coming with the new book, for example forward and backward formulas for individual state variables for situations when the upwind direction is known in advance. The simulation part of PDEFIT became the new solver for 1D partial differential equations of MathCad (MathSoft Inc.). On the other hand, there are dozens of implementations in industry and academia as one of the two numerical codes of EASY-FIT ( http://www.uni- bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/pdefit.htm).
d) EASY-FIT V3.34: The new version is released and contains a couple of additional features, some of them not available in the trial version of the book:
Meanwhile, the system is in use in several firms and in about 20 academic research institutions. Please see my home page for more details, screen shots, demo version, relevant publications, etc. ( http://www.uni- bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/easy_fit.htm).(i) NLPQLP (K. Schittkowski): A new Fortran version of the SQP code NLPQL for nonlinear programming for distributed systems ( http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/nlpqlp.htm)
(ii) NLP Test examples (K. Schittkowski): Fortran source codes of 306 test problems together with a report and a test frame ( http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/tpnp.htm)
(iii) PDEFIT V3.9 (K. Schittkowski): Fortran code to solve data fitting problems in systems of one-dimensional linear or nonlinear partial differential equations ( http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/pdefit.htm)
(iv) EASY-FIT V3.34 (K. Schittkowski): Interactive data fitting in dynamical systems, 1,000 test examples ( http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/easy_fit.htm)
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=============================
Interviewee: Masakazu Kojima
Interviewer: Akiko Yoshise
Date: February 2003
=============================
1.Your full name, address and e-mail address.
Masakazu KojimaE-mail address: kojima@is.titech.ac.jp
Home page address: http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~kojima/index.html
2. Your highest degree, awarding institution and year.
Dr. of Engineering, Keio University, March 1974.
3. How many research papers have you published (including papers accepted for publication)? How many of them in the field of optimization?
85 refereed papers. All of them are in the field of optimization.
4. Your research interests.
Semidefinite Programming, Global Optimization, Interior-Point Method, Polyhedral Homotopy Continuation Method for Polynomial System. Linear Programming, Nonlinear Programming, Combinatorial Optimization,
5. Some of your most representative papers, books and/or software packages.
[A] M. Kojima, "Strongly Stable Stationary Solutions in
Nonlinear Programs," in: S. M. Robinson ed., Analysis and
Computation of Fixed Points (Academic Press, New York),
93-138 (1980).
[B] M. Kojima, S. Mizuno and A. Yoshise, "A Primal-Dual
Interior Point Algorithm for Linear Programming", in: N.
Megiddo, ed., Progress in Mathematical Programming: Interior
Point and Related Methods (Springer-Verlag, New York) 29-47
(1989).
[C] M. Kojima, S. Mizuno and A. Yoshise, "A Polynomial-Time
Algorithm for a Class of Linear Complementarity Problems",
Mathematical Programming, Vol.44, 1-26 (1989).
[D] M. Kojima, N. Megiddo, T. Noma and A. Yoshise, "A Unified
Approach to Interior Point Algorithms for Linear
Complementarity Problems", Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Vol. 538, Springer-Verlag, 1991.
[E] M. Kojima, S. Shindoh and S. Hara, "Interior-Point
Methods for the Monotone Linear Complementarity Problem in
Symmetric Matrices", SIAM J. Optimization, Vol. 7, 86-125
(1997).
[F] K. Fujisawa, M. Kojima, K. Nakata and M. Yamashita, "SDPA
(Semidefinite Programming Algorithm) Version 6," http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~yamashi9/sdpa/index.html
6. Please describe your major contributions in optimization.
My main contributions in optimization are:
7. Your PhD students: how many them, please present names of some of them.
I supervised 19 doctoral students. Among them, 11 students worked mainly on continuous optimization for their doctor thesises. I served as a co-supervisor for the other 8 students, who worked mainly on combinatorial optimization under the supervision of Professors Komei Fukuda, Kazuo Murota, Akihisa Tamura and/or Tomomi Matsui; I would like to express my deep thanks to them. I am glad to mention that four were female students and two were foreign students.
One of my principles is to treat current or former students equally. Instead of naming some, I would like to give you the address of my home page "http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~kojima/lab/index-e.html" where you can find the names of my former students in the section of former members of Kojima lab.
8. What are the most important recent developments in the optimization branch you are working on? Please specify the name of the branch.
Semidefinite program and its applications.
9. What are the most interesting unsolved problems in the optimization branch you are working on?
Global optimization of general nonlinear programs
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I studied under Professor Masakazu Kojima 10 years, beginning as an undergraduate student, and ending as a research associate of his laboratory. Here I would like to introduce him of those days.
When I entered his laboratory as an undergraduate student in 1983 it was small; the members consisting of Professor Kojima, research associate Professor Komei Fukuda (currently professor at McGill), third year doctoral student Shinji Mizuno (currently professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology), two master's course students and six undergraduate students.
It was still only in its fifth year, having been founded in 1979. At the first meeting, he explained to us his educational policy, "I promise to create a good academic environment for you, but for better or worse, will not interfere with you. So, take all responsibilities yourself on what you study." While there are professors who hate their students to work with other researchers, he has no such narrow-minded idea at all, indeed he advises his students to actively go out and study with other people. As a result, his students have been able to select their research themes from wide areas of mathematical programming and its related areas, not only nonlinear optimization which is his special field. For example, my bachelor thesis is on a problem in combinatorial optimization (and ever since, I have studied combinatorial optimization), and the subjects which have been studied by his students belong to such diverse areas as game theory, finance engineering, computational geometry.
Furthermore, his freehearted personality and the open atmosphere of his laboratory have attracted many researchers and students, providing further widening of available fields.
As he promised us, he offered a very good academic environment.
As a person, he is friendly to students in ordinary moments. For example, when I was a student, he always had lunch with us, and it was delightful to talk with him and see his natural personality. He, however, is strict at seminars. Two comments are particularly impressive in my memory. The first is "Explain it by using figures, you can do it if you really understand it." Farkas' lemma is a standard subject.
The second often amazed everyone; he would suddenly awake from a seemingly sound sleep at a crucial moment and ask the speaking student ``Why?'', causing much consternation to the student, who was usually quite happy that he had not been awake. He apparently followed the talk, even when he was asleep!
The small laboratory of twenty years ago has now become one of the biggest research bases of mathematical programming in Japan. About twenty graduates of his laboratory have obtained doctoral degrees.
I hope that he continues to produce important work and nurture young researchers as he has always done.
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I was lucky to be a master course student of Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) under the supervision of Professor Kojima unexpectedly. When I took the examination of the master course, he was not in the list of professors of TIT, so I chose Professor Morimura as my supervisor. As soon as I entered the master course, I knew that Prof. Kojima became a new professor of TIT, and I decided to do research under his supervision.
While I was a student of Prof. Kojima, I learned from him everything: how to find research topics, how to do research, how to write a research paper, and so on. The research topic he gave me was a fixed point algorithm for solving a polynomial system of equations. I learned a homotopy method and algorithms for tracing a path from him. This knowledge of the homotopy method was very useful for me to develop various interior point methods later.
Two years later (1986) after I finished my doctoral course under the supervision of Prof. Kojima, I became an assistant professor in the department of industrial engineering and management sciences of TIT, where I met Akiko Yoshise, an excellent student of the department. Prof. Kojima gave us a chance to do joint research. We discussed almost every day for developing an interior point algorithm which use both primal and dual linear programming problems. Because of the leadership of Prof. Kojima, fortunately we could develop a new interior point method for LP, which is very well-known as a primal-dual interior point algorithm nowadays. Since then, professor Kojima has always been a leader of the research group.
The research style of Prof. Kojima is very open to everybody, and many people joined in his group, namely Professors Y. Yamamoto, N. Megiddo, K. Fukuda, S. Hara and many students. It seems for me whenever Prof. Kojima gets a new idea, he is willing to discuss the idea with other members of his group or he sometimes gives a hint of the new idea to his students and waits for them to find the idea by themselves. This is why it is seldom for him to be a single author of a research paper, why many researchers gathered in his group, and why he has many excellent students, I think.
Prof. Kojima gave me several opportunities to visit IBM Almaden research center, where we did research with Dr. Nimrod Megiddo. Through these opportunities, I learned from Prof. Kojima how to do research with excellent international researchers. In fact, when I visited Cornell University and Wuerzburg University, I could smoothly do a joint work with Professors M. Todd, Y. Ye, J. Stoer, and F. Jarre, for example.
Professor Kojima is still very active in his research and in teaching students. I wish for him to be healthy and to continue his work long time.
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Many years ago, when I was still living in Israel, I received a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to visit Japan for several months in order to collaborate with researchers in various areas. It was the first time I visited Japan and I had not known much about this wonderful country, except for the works of a few academics. Shortly after my arrival, I met with Prof. Kojima and we immediately embarked on a joint research program in mathematical programming. I enjoyed our collaboration and Prof. Kojima's hospitality so much that the work with him became the centerpiece of my visit and I had only little time left to pursue connections with other researchers.
To this day I cherish that visit to Japan so much thanks to the remarkable hospitality of Prof. Kojima and his family. We developed a friendship for years to come. A couple of years later our families met several times in Illinois while we were staying in U.S. on leaves from our home institutions. It was so nice to watch our children growing. In the following years we met in various parts of the world in many conferences and subsequent visits of mine to Japan and his to the United States.
I am very grateful to Prof. Kojima for all the work we have done together. I learned from him a lot and I adore him as a colleague and friend. He is extremely knowledgeable and I have always looked up to him and his expertise. He is one of the most reliable people I know. His thoroughness and responsibility are phenomenal. He symbolizes for me the admirable supreme virtues of Japanese culture.
Prof. Kojima has introduced me to a number of remarkable people whom I was fortunate to work with at Almaden Research Center with support of the United States government. Over several years, he visited at Almaden together with Shinji Mizuno, Takashi Tsuchiya, Akiko Yoshise and Toshihito Noma. The collaboration with all these wonderful fine people was very successful and rewarding for me. I am very thankful to Prof. Kojima for introducing them to me. I will never forget the long hours of such interesting discussions we had together, and how they were always coming up with new ideas and following up the next day after further working on the ideas during the evenings and nights.
My interests have shifted in recent years and I miss working in the area of our mutual interest, but I hope one day we will rejoin and continue the joint work.
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To view to photographs see here and here.
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The book "Duality Principles in Nonconvex Systems: Theory, Methods and Applications" by David Yang Gao was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000. The reader can find a Word document for download here or a pdf file for viewing here which contains the Preface and Table of Contents for this book. See also the following two reviews for this book.
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A review of the book "Duality Principles in Nonconvex Systems: Theory, Methods and Applications" by David Gao by G.A.Maugin, published in Applied Mechanics Review, Vol. 53, No. 9, 2000, B96 can be viewed here as a pdf document.
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A review of a book by Gao published in Meccanica, is available for download here as a Word document or can be viewed as a pdf document here.
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The book "Global Optimization with Non-convex constraints" by R. Strongin and Y. Sergeyev was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000. The reader can find the abstract of this book below and also Preface (see here) and Table of Contents (see here) We also provide two reviews on this book.
Abstract:
Mathematical problems of minimizing (or maximizing) a multiextremal function under some non-convex functional constraints, which are the subject of this book, often arise as models of decision making in the world of applications. The outlined essential non-monotonicity of the problem functionals is the consequence of the raising complexity in the decision objectives and in the conditions under which the decisions are to be executed. Local adjustments are often insufficient to produce the best solution in this new reality and the Decision Science accepts this challenge and intensively tracks the ways in the realm of Global Optimization.
The present volume is the first systematic and comprehensive presentation of a new approach to the Global Non-Convex Constrained Multivariate Optimization based on reducing the problem dimension via Peano-type Space Filling Curves specially developed to ensure better translation of the metric properties in many dimensions to the one-dimensional scales (theory, algorithms, and software for these mappings and their inverse mappings are provided).
In the frame of this approach each constraint is accounted separately (penalties are not employed) and it is admitted that the problem functionals could be defined not everywhere in the search domain, which is typical for many applications. Multicriteria constrained case is also considered. Suggested techniques are generalized for execution on multi processor systems and expose the important property of non-redundant parallelism.
The book is a valuable source of information to faculty, students, and researchers in optimization, applied mathematics, and computer science (readership is supposed to be familiar with the elements of mathematical analysis). It could serve as a tool for people from different applied areas and also as the origin for many other successful developments.
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"Global Optimization with Non-convex Constraints" by R. Strongin and Y. Sergeyev is reviewed by P. Pardalos has been published in Journal of Global Optimization can be viewed here
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Review on the book by R. Strongin and Y. Sergeyev by S. Butenko (published in Optimization Methods and Software) can be found here.
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The book "Finite-dimensional Variational Inequalities and Complementarity problems", Volume 1 and Volume 2 by Francisco Facchinei and Jong-Shi Pang was published by Springer Verlag NY in Springer Series in Operations Research in 2003.
This comprehensive book presents a rigorous and state-of-the art treatment of variational inequalities and complementarity problems in finite dimensions. This class of mathematical programming problems provides a powerful framework for the unified analysis and development of efficient solution algorithms for a wide range of equilibrium problems in economics, engineering, finance, and applied sciences. New research material and recent results, not otherwise easily accessible, are presented in a self-contained and consistent matter. The book is published in two volumes, with the first volume concentrating on the basic theory and the second on iterative algorithms. Both volumes contain abundant exercises and feature extensive bibliographies. Written with a wide range of readers in mind, including graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics, optimization, and operations research as well as computational economists and engineers, the book aims at being an enduring reference on the subject and at providing the foundation for its continued growth.
They will find there, among other things, the table of contents of the book along with its preface and the complete bibliography.
For Preface see here. For Table of Contents see here.Return to the Table of Contents
The book "Numerical Data Fitting in Dynamical Systems - A Practical Introduction with Software and Applications" by Klaus Schittkowski was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002.
The main objective of the book is to give an overview of numerical methods to compute parameters of a dynamical model by a least squares fit of experimental data. The mathematical equations are explicit model functions or steady state systems in the simplest case, or responses of dynamical systems defined by ordinary differential equations, differential algebraic equations, partial differential equations, and partial differential algebraic equations (1D).
The book comes with 12 application models worked out in more detail, numerical test results, and a set of 1,000 test examples on a CD-ROM. The CD contains an interactive data fitting program (EASY-FIT) running under MS- Windows to 'play' with these test cases.
Preface and Table of Contents see here (see also http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/math/~kschittkowski/dyn_sys_book.htm
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The next ICOTA will be held on Dec 9 -- Dec12, 2004
The International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA) is a conference series. The goal of ICOTA is to provide an international forum for scientists, researchers, software developers, and practitioners to exchange ideas and approaches, to present research findings and state-of-the-art solutions, to share experiences on potentials and limits, and to open new avenues of research and developments, on all issues and topics related to optimization.
It was advertised in the issue 8 of ORB that next ICOTA will be held in Ballarat (Australia) from September 26 till September 28, 2004. After this publication where were advised by many of potential attendees of ICOTA that this time slot is not convenient for them and they will not be able to attend the meeting. ICOTA is an official conference series of POP. After some discussions with members of the POP board and some people organizing previous conferences of this series, the decision was made that the best time for the next ICOTA is December 9 -December 11, 2004
The web site of ICOTA is now available (see ICOTA/index.shtml
Here you can find the logo of ICOTA
6.
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Forthcoming Conferences:
German-Israeli Minerva School on Modern Optimization and its Applications in Engineering II.
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Forthcoming Conference:
Topology Optimization Days
The State-of-the-Art in Theory, Software and
Applications.
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Forthcoming Conference:
International School of Mathematics "G.Stampacchia" 38th Workshop:
VARIATIONAL ANALYSIS AND APPLICATIONS
ERICE, Spicily:
June 20 - July 1, 2003
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OCA2003 -- 2003 The Third International Conference on Optimization and Control with Applications
Forthcoming Conference:
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