Robert Fourer

Robert Fourer (born September 2, 1950) is a scientist working in the area of operations research and management science. He is currently President of AMPL Optimization, Inc and is Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University.[1] Robert Fourer is recognized as being the designer of the popular modeling language for mathematical programming called AMPL.

Together with David M. Gay and Brian Kernighan he was awarded 1993 ORSA/CSTS Prize[2] by the Computer Science Technical Section of the Operations Research Society of America, for writings on the design of mathematical programming systems and the AMPL modeling language. Robert Fourer was also awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences in 2002.[3] He was elected to the 2004 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.[4]

Prior to the invention of AMPL, a series of articles by Fourer extended the Simplex algorithm to allow for the objective to be convex separable piecewise-linear.[5][6][7] He also worked with Sanjay Mehrotra to solve indefinite linear systems arising in interior-point methods. Their method was more numerically stable than other methods previously proposed.[8]

  1. ^ https://www.or-exchange.org/users/503/4er/
  2. ^ "Home - Computing Society" (PDF).
  3. ^ List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 2002
  4. ^ Fellows: Alphabetical List, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, retrieved 2019-10-09
  5. ^ Fourer, Robert (1985). "A simplex algorithm for piecewise-linear programming I: Derivation and proof". Mathematical Programming. 33 (2): 204–233. doi:10.1007/BF01582246. S2CID 3359434.
  6. ^ Fourer, Robert (1988). "A simplex algorithm for piecewise-linear programming II: Finiteness, feasibility and degeneracy". Mathematical Programming. 41 (1–3): 281–315. doi:10.1007/BF01580769. S2CID 35190836.
  7. ^ Fourer, Robert (1992). "A simplex algorithm for piecewise-linear programming III: Computational analysis and applications". Mathematical Programming. 53 (1–3): 213–235. doi:10.1007/BF01585703. S2CID 41281704.
  8. ^ Fourer, Robert; Mehrotra, Sanjay (1993). "Solving symmetric indefinite systems in an interior-point method for linear programming". Mathematical Programming. 62 (1–3): 15–39. doi:10.1007/BF01585158. S2CID 16319200.