Robert Bixby

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Robert Bixby in Oberwolfach (2004)

Robert E. Bixby (born September 14, 1945 ) is an American mathematician whose specialty is linear and integer optimization . He is best known for his work on the traveling salesman problem and as the founder of the company CPLEX Optimization (part of IBM since 2008), which sells software for mathematical optimization . With his work on the traveling salesman problem, Bixby has made significant contributions to the further development of cutting plane and branch-and-cut methods, some of which are now also used as standard for solving other integer optimization problems.

Education and career

Bixby received his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from the University of California in 1968 . In 1971 and 1972 he earned a Masters and PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University . After several years as a research associate and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison , the University of Kentucky and Cornell University, he was appointed professor at Northwestern University in 1977 . In 1983 he moved to Rice University , where he still works today. In the meantime he stayed in Bonn , Berlin , Augsburg and at Northwestern University.

research

Robert Bixby initially only worked on theoretical aspects of operations research . At the beginning of the 1980s he began to deal with the numerics of solution methods for linear programs and implemented a variant of the simplex method . In the course of time he continued to improve the implementation and finally brought out the first commercial version of the LP solver CPLEX in 1987. From 1990, Bixby, together with David Applegate , Vašek Chvátal and William Cook, used the traveling salesman as an example to develop new methods for solving integer linear programs (including new cutting planes ), which are now standard in this area. Using the new methods, they set several records of size for this problem. These methods were incorporated into CPLEX in parallel , so that this program is one of the best solvers for integer linear programs today and is used both in research and in industry. In 2008 he founded his own company, Gurobi, together with Zonghao Gu and Edward Rothberg.

Bixby was Vice Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society until 2004 .

Awards and honors

literature

  • David Applegate, Robert Bixby, Vašek Chvátal, William Cook: On the Solution of Traveling Salesman Problems. Documenta Mathematica, Extra Volume III on the International Congress of Mathematicians 1998, pages 645–656. ( Postscript ; GZIP ; 66 kB)
  • Robert Bixby: Solving real-world linear programs: A decade and more of progress. Operations Research, Volume 50, No. 1, 2002

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Frederick W. Lanchester Prize. (No longer available online.) Informs.org ( Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences ), archived from the original on October 2, 2015 ; accessed on February 16, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.informs.org
personal data
SURNAME Bixby, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bixby, Robert E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1945