Richard A. Tapia

Richard Alfred Tapia ( born March 25, 1939 in Santa Monica, California) is an American mathematician who deals with mathematical optimization and numerical algorithms to do so.

Tapia, who grew up in Los Angeles, made in 1961 and his bachelor's degree ( interrupted by two years of work in the industry) in 1966 his master's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA ), where he in 1967 Magnus Hestenes received his doctorate (A generalization of Newton 's method with application to the Euler -Lagrange Equation). He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin -Madison and in 1970 at Rice University in Houston, where he rose to associate professor in 1972 and 1976 received a full professorship in 1968. From 1991, he was there Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, and from 2005 Maxfield and Oshman Professor of Engineering and also received the title of University Professor at Rice University, the highest academic rank at the University. He is there also an Associate Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education, under which he worked intensively with the promotion of minorities ( ethnic minorities, women ). His aufgelegtes at Rice University program gave the University a national leader in the promotion of minorities in applied mathematics and engineering. Tapia is himself the son of immigrants from Mexico. 1978 to 1983 he was faced with the mathematics faculty at Rice University. In the 1980s, he was also an adjunct professor at Baylor College of Medicine, and from 2000 at the University of Houston.

Tapia has been working for his dissertation, optimization problems, and algorithms to solve them. In particular, he was concerned in the 1970s with the Newton's method and its variants and their extension to optimization problems with constraints such as eigenvalue problems. In the 1990s, he dealt in particular with the interior -point method.

He was appointed by U.S. President Bill Clinton at the National Science Board, where he was until 2002 1996. 2001 to 2004 he stood before the Board of Higher Education and the Workforce of the National Research Council. In 2010 he received the National Medal of Science, and he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering ( the first American of Hispanic background) 1992. In 2004 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the SIAM. He holds an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University and the Colorado School of Mines. 2013 Tapia was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In his spare time he restores classic cars and drove in the 1960 drag racing. He also held lectures on the application of mathematical principles to car racing.

Writings

• With James R. Thompson: Nonparametric function estimation, modeling, and simulation. SIAM 1990
• With James R. Thompson: Nonparametric probability density estimation. Johns Hopkins University Press 1978