William J. Cook

William J. Cook ( born October 18, 1957 in New Jersey) is an American mathematician whose specialty is linear and integer programming. In addition to contributions to various graph-theoretic problems like the matching problem, he is primarily known for his work on the problem of a Salesman ( TSP). As part of this optimization problem Cook has contributed significant contributions to the advancement of cutting planes and branch-and -cut methods that are used today to some extent in solving other integer optimization problems by default. The co-developed by him, branch-and- cut- based program Concorde to solve the problem of the traveling salesman was involved in all TSP records of recent years.

Academic Career

Cook acquired in 1979 a Bachelor in Mathematics at Rutgers University and a year later the master in the art Operations Research at Stanford University. Three years later he earned his doctorate at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. After a two-year stay at the Institute for Operations Research in Bonn, he spent some time as a research fellow at Cornell University and Columbia University before he joined Bellcore in 1988.

After another year and a half in Bonn, he got in 1996 a professor of applied mathematics at Rice University in Texas, where he studied, among others, Robert Bixby and David Applegate on solution methods for the problem of the traveling salesman. After a stay at Princeton University from 2000 to 2002 Cook moved to Georgia Tech, where he has since worked as a professor.

In 2000, Cook was awarded the Beale - Orchard -Hayes Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society for his paper with Applegate, Bixby and Chvátal (see references ) and the 2007 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize - with Bixby, Chvatal and Applegate. He is editor of the journal Mathematical Programming, Series A.

Writings

  • By: William Cunningham, Alexander Schrijver: Combinatorial Optimization. John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1998.
  • With: Paul Seymour: Polyhedral Combinatorics. DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 1, American Mathematical Society, 1990.
  • By: David Applegate, Robert Bixby, Vasek Chvátal: On the Solution of Traveling Salesman problem. In: Documenta Mathematica, Extra Volume III of the International Congress of Mathematicians 1998, pages 645-656. (Postscript, GZIP, 68 kB)
  • With László Lovász, Jens Vygen: Research Trends in Combinatorial Optimization. Springer -Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-540-76795-4.
Cutting-plane method Branch-and-Cut Georgia Institute of Technology Integrated Authority File
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