Jorge Nocedal Awarded John von Neumann Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Nocedal was recognized for his fundamental work in nonlinear optimization
Northwestern Engineering’s Jorge Nocedal has been awarded the 2024 John von Neumann Prize, the highest honor bestowed by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
Nocedal, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management and director of the Center for Optimization and Statistical Learning, was recognized for his fundamental work in nonlinear optimization, both in the deterministic and stochastic settings. As part of the prize, Nocedal will deliver the flagship lecture on July 9 at SIAM’s 2024 annual meeting.
“I am very excited to receive such a prestigious award,” Nocedal said. “Optimization is everywhere. It drives weather forecasts and creates machine learning models. I am very happy to see that my algorithms and software are used in dozens of disciplines, including many outside science and engineering.”
SIAM awards the John von Neumann Prize annually to an individual for outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematics and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community. It is one of SIAM’s most distinguished prizes.
Nocedal’s main area of research is optimization, with applications in machine learning, engineering design, and the physical sciences. His research activities range from the design of new algorithms to their software implementation and mathematical analysis. Nocedal tackles large-scale problems (with millions of variables), optimization under uncertainty, and machine learning.
A prolific author of academic papers, Nocedal was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2020. His career achievements, including vast contributions to the theory of nonlinear optimization methods and the creation of new, widely applied algorithms, earned him the George B. Dantzig Prize in 2012 from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the 2017 John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).