The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has announced that Arkadi Nemirovski has been selected as a 2018 Fellow. Nemirovski is the John Hunter Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and joins 176 other AAAS 2018 fellows. Founded during the American Revolution, AAAS is one of the oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers in the U.S. Selection by the academy is a high honor, and Nemirovksi’s cohort includes former president Barack Obama and the actor Tom Hanks.

“Congratulations to Arkadi on this outstanding professional achievement,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “His selection as an AAAS fellow reflects his long career of making numerous significant contributions to the fields of optimization theory and algorithms.”

In specific, Nemirovski’s research focuses on investigating complexity and developing efficient algorithms for nonlinear convex programs, optimization under uncertainty, applications of convex optimization in engineering, and nonparametric statistics.

Throughout the course of his career, Nemirovski has made significant contributions in several areas. At the age of 27, while on vacation, he invented the ellipsoid method, which is one of the most fundamental developments in optimization.

Later, with Yurii Nesterov, Nemirovski contributed to the development of interior point methods — a second game-changer and breakthrough in the field.

Yet another contribution of his centers on the development, with Ronny Ben-Tal, of the field of robust optimization, which is a modeling contribution. They created a framework that is able to handle uncertainty in problem data.

Along with his AAAS selection, in recognition of his seminal and profound contributions to continuous optimization, Nemirovski has been awarded the top prizes in the field: the 1982 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society (joint with Leonid Khachiyan and David Yudin); the Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1991 (joint with Martin Grötschel); and the 2003 John von Neumann Theory Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (along with Michael Todd). He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2017, the first year he was eligible. Election to the NAE is one of the highest professional honors for an engineer.

Nemirovski earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics (1974) from Moscow State University, a Doctor of Sciences in Mathematics (1990) from the Supreme Attestation Board at the USSR Council of Ministers, and the Doctor of Mathematics (Honoris Causa, 2009) from the University of Waterloo, Canada.