Teofilo F. Gonzalez


Teofilo Francisco Gonzalez Arce is a Mexican-American computer scientist who is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 1972 Gonzalez was one of the first students who earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in Mexico, at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education.
He completed his Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Sartaj Sahni. He taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1975 to 1976, at the Pennsylvania State University from 1976 to 1979, at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education from 1979 to 1980, and at the University of Texas at Dallas from 1980 to 1984, before joining the UCSB computer science faculty in 1984. He spent Sabbatical Leaves at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. Professor Gonzalez became Fellow of IASTED in 2009.
He is known for his highly cited pioneering research in the hardness of approximation;
for his sub-linear and best possible approximation algorithm based on the farthest-first traversal for the metric k-center problem ;
and for introducing the open-shop scheduling problem as well as algorithms for its solution that have found numerous applications in several research areas as well as for his research on flow shop scheduling, and job shop scheduling algorithms.
He is the editor of the Handbook on Approximation Algorithms and Metaheuristics, and he is co-editor of Volume 1 of the Computing Handbook Set.

Selected publications