Robert E. Bixby is an American mathematician, the Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of Computational and Applied Mathematics at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres. Rice University comp ...

. Bixby received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

with a major in

industrial engineering Industrial engineering (IE) is concerned with the design, improvement and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, information, equipment and energy. It draws upon specialized knowledge and skill in the mathematical, physical, an ...

from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

(1968) and a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

operations research Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a branch of applied mathematics that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve management and ...

from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

(1972). His dissertation, ''Composition and Decomposition of Matroids and Related Topics'', concerned

matroid theory In combinatorics, a matroid is a structure that abstracts and generalizes the notion of linear independence in vector spaces. There are many equivalent ways to define a matroid Axiomatic system, axiomatically, the most significant being in terms ...

and was supervised by Louis Billera. His doctoral students have included Collette Coullard at

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

, and Eva K. Lee at Rice. He is the President and Co-founder of Gurobi Optimization. In 1987 he co-founded

CPLEX IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio (often informally referred to simply as CPLEX) is an optimization software package. History The CPLEX Optimizer was named after the simplex method implemented in the C programming language. However, today ...

Optimization, which was acquired by

ILOG ILOG S.A. was an international software company purchased and incorporated into IBM announced in January, 2009. It created enterprise software products for supply chain, business rule management, visualization and optimization. The main product ...

in 1997. Bixby was elected a member of the

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

in 1997 for contributions to

combinatorial optimization Combinatorial optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects, where the set of feasible solutions is discrete or can be reduced to a discrete set. Typical combina ...

and the development and commercialization of high-performance optimization software. He is also a fellow of the

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often s ...

References

External links

Mathematics, Rice University
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Rice University faculty 20th-century American mathematicians University of Kentucky faculty Northwestern University faculty Cornell University alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences 21st-century American mathematicians {{US-mathematician-stub