Title:  A happy home coming after a fruitful “non”-journey

Abstract: The home in the title refers to the origin of optimization, i.e., linear programming (LP) and its extensions to (convex) quadratic programming (QP) and the linear complementarity problem (LCP), the latter being the virgin focus of the speaker’s research career.   The “non”-journey refers to the speaker’s recent exploration in the area of optimization with “non”-features.  After wandering many years in this journey, the speaker returns to the basics of the field and will talk about some new, and some not so new results about the solution of some classes of LPs, convex QPs, and LCPs by simplex-type pivoting methods, a topic that is (almost) forgotten amid today’s IT hype of ML, AI, chatGPT, etc.  The results pertain to bounds on the number of pivots, some of which are linear in the number of variables and thus render the problems strongly polynomially solvable.

Bio: Elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in February 2021 and appointed a Distinguished Professor in April 2023, Jong-Shi Pang joined the University of Southern California as the Epstein Family Chair and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering in August 2013. Prior to this position, he was the Caterpillar Professor and Head of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne for six years between 2007 and 2013. He held the position of the Margaret A. Darrin Distinguished Professor in Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and was a Professor of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 2003 to 2007. He was a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University from 1987 to 2003, an Associate Professor and then Professor in the School of Management from 1982 to 1987 at the University of Texas at Dallas, and an Assistant and then an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1977 to 1982. During 1999 and 2001 (full time) and 2002 (part-time), he was a Program Director in the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Professor Pang has served as the Department Academic Advisor of the Department of Mathematics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has given many distinguished lectures at universities worldwide and plenary lectures at international conferences.