Jorge Nocedal (born 1952) is a

applied mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

and the Walter P. Murphy professor at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Chart ...

who in 2017 received the John Von Neumann Theory Prize. He was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

in 2020. Nocedal specializes in nonlinear optimization, both in the deterministic and stochastic setting. The motivation for his current algorithmic and theoretical research stems from applications in

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and

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

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, and

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. In the past, he has also worked on equilibrium problems with application in robotics, traffics, and games, optimization applications in finance, as well as PDE-constrained optimization.

Biography

Nocedal was born and raised in Mexico. He obtained a B.Sc. in physics from the

National University of Mexico The National Autonomous University of Mexico ( es, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) is a public research university in Mexico. It is consistently ranked as one of the best universities in Latin America, where it's also the bigges ...

in 1974. From 1974 to 1978, Nocedal studied at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universit ...

where he obtained a PhD in

mathematical sciences The mathematical sciences are a group of areas of study that includes, in addition to mathematics, those academic disciplines that are primarily mathematical in nature but may not be universally considered subfields of mathematics proper. Statis ...

under the supervision of Richard A. Tapia. Prior to joining Northwestern University in 1983, Nocedal spent three years (1978-1981) as an assistant professor at the National University of Mexico and two years (1981-1983) as a research assistant at the

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU), and is among the most prestigious mathematics schools and mathematical sciences research cente ...

at NYU. Nocedal joined the

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is an academic program at many universities which comprises scientific and engineering aspects of computing. CSE is also a term often used in Europe to translate the name of engineering informatics academic p ...

department at

in 1983. He held this appointment until 2012, before joining the

Industrial Engineering Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information an ...

and Management Sciences department, where he served as the David and Karen Sachs Professor and Chair from 2013 to 2017.

Contributions

Nocedal is well-known for his research in nonlinear optimization, particularly for his work on L-BFGS and his textbook Numerical Optimization. In 2001, Nocedal co-founded Ziena Optimization Inc. and co-developed the KNITRO software package. Nocedal was a chief scientist at Ziena Optimization Inc. from 2002 to 2012 before the company was subsequently bought by Artelys in 2015.

Awards and honors

Nocedal has won numerous awards in the fields of nonlinear optimization, applied mathematics and operations research. In 1998, he was the invited speaker to the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Berlin. He was named an

ISI Highly Cited Researcher The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analys ...

in 2004. He received the

George B. Dantzig Prize The Dantzig Prize is given every 3 years to one or more individuals for research which, by virtue of its originality, breadth, and depth, has a major impact on the field of mathematical programming. It is named in honor of George B. Dantzig and i ...

in 2012 and the Charles Broyden Prize in 2009. He was also named a

SIAM Fellow The SIAM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognizes outstanding members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The goal of the program is to: *honor SIAM members who are recognized by their peers as distinguished ...

in 2010. In 2017, he received the INFORMS John Von Neumann Theory Prize. Nocedal was elected a member of the

in 2020 for contributions to the theory, design, and implementation of optimization algorithms and machine learning software.

References

External links

Nocedal's home page at Northwestern

Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University

Publications
from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nocedal, Jorge 1952 births Rice University alumni Applied mathematicians Northwestern University faculty 20th-century Mexican mathematicians 21st-century Mexican mathematicians Expatriate academics in the United States Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics John von Neumann Theory Prize winners Living people