Tamas Terlaky


Tamas Terlaky is a Hungarian-Canadian-American professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University. He is especially well-known for his work on criss-cross algorithms, interior-point methods, Klee-Minty examples for path following algorithms, and optimization.

Biography

Terlaky was born on January 10, 1955, in Kaposvár, Hungary. He studied Mathematics and Operations Research at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. He earned his Ph.D. in 1981 under the supervision of Emil Klafszky. Terlaky taught at Eötvös Loránd University from 1981 to 1989; at the Delft University of Technology from 1989 to 1999; and at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario from 1999 to 2008, when he moved to Lehigh University. At Lehigh, he holds the George N. and Soteria Kledaras Endowed Chair. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the Chair of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department. Since 2020 he is Director of the Quantum Computing and Optimization Laboratory.
He was founding Chair and since 2003 Honorary Chair of EUROPT, The Continuous Optimization Working group of EURO. From 2017 to 2019, he was elected as Chair of the SIAM Activity Group of Optimization. Since 2019, he is Vice President of INFORMS.

Career

In 1985 and 1987, Terlaky independently published on the criss-cross algorithm. The theory of oriented matroids has also been used by Terlaky and Zhang to prove that their criss-cross algorithms have finite termination for linear programming problems.
Terlaky has previously taught at Eötvös Loránd University and Delft University of Technology. From 1999 to 2008, he was Professor at the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University, and was also the founding director of the School of Computational Engineering and Science at the same university.
In 2020, Terlaky, along with Luis Zuluaga and Boris Defourny, was the recipient of a large quantum computing research grant from DARPA.
Terlaky is also a founding editor-in-chief of Optimization and Engineering, a journal specializing in mathematical optimization and its applications. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Computational Optimization and Applications, European Journal on Operational research, Optimization Methods and Software, Optimization Letters, and Journal of Computational Sciences.

Recognition

Terlaky has been elected as:
In 2017, he was awarded the 2017 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for helping to improve algorithmic efficiency at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections by creating the unique Inmate Assignment Decision Support System.
Also, in 2019, for his pioneering work in correctional systems, he was awarded the Outstanding Innovation in Service Systems Engineering award by the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
Additional awards:

Books

Terlaky has published over 160 papers, some of which are: