Paul Tseng () was a

Chinese-American Chinese Americans are Americans of Han Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans along with their ancestors trace lineage from m ...

(Hakka Taiwanese) and Canadian applied

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

and a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

, in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region ...

. Tseng was recognized by his peers to be one of the leading optimization researchers of his generation. On August 13, 2009, Paul Tseng went missing while kayaking in the

Yangtze River The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ; ) is the longest list of rivers of Asia, river in Asia, the list of rivers by length, third-longest in the world, and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. It rises at Jari Hill in th ...

in the

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the C ...

province of China and is presumed dead.

Biography

Paul Tseng was born September 21, 1959 in

Hsinchu, Taiwan Hsinchu (, Chinese: 新竹, Pinyin: ''Xīnzhú'', Wade–Giles: ''Hsin¹-chu²'') is a city located in northwestern Taiwan. It is the most populous city in Taiwan Province not among the special municipalities, with estimated 450,655 inhabi ...

. In December 1970, Tseng's family moved to

Vancouver, British Columbia Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. The ...

. Tseng received his B.Sc. from Queen's University in 1981 and his Ph.D. from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1986. In 1990 Tseng moved to the

's Department of Mathematics. Tseng has conducted research primarily in continuous optimization and secondarily in discrete optimization and distributed computation.

Research

Tseng made many contributions to mathematical optimization, publishing many articles and helping to develop quality software that has been widely used. He published over 120 papers in optimization and had close collaborations with several colleagues, including

Dimitri Bertsekas Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas (born 1942, Athens, el, Δημήτρης Παντελής Μπερτσεκάς) is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering ...

and Zhi-Quan Tom Luo. Tseng's research subjects include: * Efficient algorithms for structured convex programs and network flow problems, * Complexity analysis of

interior point method Interior-point methods (also referred to as barrier methods or IPMs) are a certain class of algorithms that solve linear and nonlinear convex optimization problems. An interior point method was discovered by Soviet mathematician I. I. Dikin in 1 ...

s for linear programming, *

Parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster of ...

and

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

, * Error bounds and convergence analysis of iterative algorithms for optimization problems and

variational inequalities In mathematics, a variational inequality is an inequality involving a functional, which has to be solved for all possible values of a given variable, belonging usually to a convex set. The mathematical theory of variational inequalities was initi ...

, * Interior point methods and semidefinite relaxations for hard quadratic and matrix optimization problems, and * Applications of large scale optimization techniques in

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as sound, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. In his research, Tseng gave a new proof for the sharpest complexity result for path-following interior-point methods for linear programming. Furthermore, together with Tom Luo, he resolved a long-standing open question on the convergence of

matrix splitting In the mathematical discipline of numerical linear algebra, a matrix splitting is an expression which represents a given matrix as a sum or difference of matrices. Many iterative methods (for example, for systems of differential equations) depen ...

algorithms for linear complementarity problems and affine variational inequalities. Tseng was the first to establish the convergence of the affine scaling algorithm for linear programming in the presence of degeneracy. Tseng has coauthored (with his Ph.D. advisor,

) a publicly available network optimization program, called RELAX, which has been widely used in industry and academia for research purposes. This software has been used by statisticians like Paul R. Rosenbaum and

Donald Rubin Donald is a masculine given name derived from the Gaelic name ''Dòmhnall''.. This comes from the Proto-Celtic *''Dumno-ualos'' ("world-ruler" or "world-wielder"). The final -''d'' in ''Donald'' is partly derived from a misinterpretation of the ...

in their work on

propensity score matching In the statistical analysis of observational data, propensity score matching (PSM) is a statistical matching technique that attempts to estimate the effect of a treatment, policy, or other intervention by accounting for the covariates that predic ...

. Tseng's software for matching has similarly been used in

nonparametric statistics Nonparametric statistics is the branch of statistics that is not based solely on parametrized families of probability distributions (common examples of parameters are the mean and variance). Nonparametric statistics is based on either being dist ...

to implement

exact test In statistics, an exact (significance) test is a test such that if the null hypothesis is true, then all assumptions made during the derivation of the distribution of the test statistic are met. Using an exact test provides a significance test ...

s. Tseng has also developed a program called ERELAXG, for network optimization problems with gains. In 2010 conferences in his honor were held at the University of Washington and at

Fudan University Fudan University () is a national public research university in Shanghai, China. Fudan is a member of the C9 League, Project 985, Project 211, and the Double First Class University identified by the Ministry of Education of China. It is als ...

in Shanghai. Tseng's personal web page can be accessed in the exact state it was at the time of his disappearance, and contains many of his writings.

Travels and disappearance

Paul Tseng was an ardent bicyclist, kayaker and backpacker. He took many adventurous trips, including kayak tours along the Mekong, the Danube, the Nile and the Amazon. On August 13, 2009, Paul Tseng went missing while kayaking in the Yantze river near Lijiang, in Yunnan province of China and is now presumed dead.

Notes

External links

Math Programming Society
from

DBLP DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since Novem ...

.
Publications
from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tseng, Paul 1959 births 2000s missing person cases 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American computer scientists American electrical engineers American people of Chinese descent American people of Taiwanese descent Canadian computer scientists Canadian electrical engineers Canadian emigrants to the United States Canadian mathematicians Canadian people of Chinese descent Control theorists Hakka scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Missing person cases in China Missing people Naturalized citizens of Canada N'Djamena People from Hsinchu Queen's University at Kingston alumni Scientists from Vancouver Systems scientists Taiwanese emigrants to Canada Academic staff of the University of British Columbia University of Washington faculty

Biography

Research

Travels and disappearance

See also

Notes

External links