Robert Fourer (born September 2, 1950) is a scientist working in the area of

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 ...

and management science. He is currently President of AMPL Optimization, Inc and is Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences 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 ...

. 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 Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born January 30, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known ...

he was awarded 1993 ORSA/CSTS Prize 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 Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

for Natural Sciences in 2002. He was elected to the 2004 class of

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

s of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. 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. 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.

Writings

''AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming, 2nd Ed.'' (2003 with David Gay and

)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fourer, Robert Living people American computer programmers Northwestern University faculty Programming language designers Scientists at Bell Labs American technology writers 1950 births Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences