Ralph Tyrrell (Terry) Rockafellar, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics from the University of Washington, Seattle, will present the Spencer C. Schantz Lecture (Technical Talk), taking place in Mohler Laboratory Room 453 on April 24, 2019. Rockafellar’s lecture is titled “Risk and Reliability in Optimization Under Uncertainty” and will explore the role for so-called "measures of risk," which started to be developed for purposes like assessing the solvency of banks but now are being utilized much more widely.
Rockafellar’s interests span from convex and variational analysis to problems of optimization and equilibrium, especially nowadays applications in finance, engineering and economics involving risk and reliability, along with schemes of problem decomposition on convex and nonconvex programming.
In addition to being a winner of the Dantzig Prize given jointly by SIAM and the Mathematical Programming Society (1983), Prof. Rockafellar has gained international recognition for his work through honorary doctorates bestowed by universities in a number of countries. INFORMS awarded him and Roger Wets the 1997 Lancaster Prize for their book Variational Analysis, and in 1999 he was further honored by INFORMS with John von Neumann Theory Prize for his fundamental contributions to the methodology of optimization. He has authored over 250 publications, including one of the all-time most highly cited books in mathematics, Convex Analysis.
The lecture series is endowed in the name of the late Spencer C. Schantz, who graduated from Lehigh in 1955 with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering. Following progressive responsibilities with several electrical manufacturing companies, in 1969 he founded U.S. Controls Corporation and became its first CEO and President. The Spencer C. Schantz Distinguished Lecture Series was established by his wife Jerelyn as a valuable educational experience for faculty, students and friends of Lehigh’s Industrial and Systems Engineering department.
Time & Location:
The technical talk is open to the public.
