William John Cook (born October 18, 1957 in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

) is an American

operations research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decis ...

er and mathematician, and Professor of Combinatorics and Optimization at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

. He was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

in 2011 for theoretical and computational contributions to discrete optimization.National Academy of Engineering member profile
retrieved 2013-01-23. He is known for his work on the

traveling salesman problem The travelling salesman problem (also called the travelling salesperson problem or TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each cit ...

and is one of the authors of the

Concorde TSP Solver The Concorde TSP Solver is a program for solving the travelling salesman problem. It was written by David Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, Vašek Chvátal, and William J. Cook, in ANSI C, and is freely available for academic use. Concorde has been ap ...

Professional career

Cook did his undergraduate studies at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...

, graduating in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. After earning a master's degree in operations research from Stanford University in 1980, he moved to the

, where he earned a Ph.D. in combinatorics and optimization in 1983 under the supervision of

U. S. R. Murty Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty,list of South Asian namesof computer scientists. Accessed on 2010-01-01. or U. S. R. Murty (as he prefers to write his name), is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of ...

. After postdoctoral studies at the

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine ...

, he joined the

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

faculty in 1985, moved to

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1987, and in 1988 joined the research staff of

Bell Communications Research iconectiv is a supplier of network planning and network management services to telecommunications providers. Known as Bellcore after its establishment in the United States in 1983 as part of the break-up of the Bell System, the company's name ...

. In 1994 he returned to academia as John von Neumann Professor at the University of Bonn, and in 1996 he moved to

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universities ...

as Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics. In 2002 he took his position at Georgia Tech. In January 2013, he moved to the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...

as the John Swanson Professor of Industrial Engineering, before returning to the University of Waterloo in June 2013 as a professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, and subsequently University Professor.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2018-07-11. From 2018-2020 he worked at Johns Hopkins University as a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal ''Mathematical Programming Computation'' (since 2008), and the former editor-in-chief of ''Mathematical Programming'' (Series B from 1993 to 2003, and Series A from 2003 to 2007).

Awards and honors

In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He won the Beale–Orchard-Hays Prize of the

Mathematical Programming Society The Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), known as the Mathematical Programming Society until 2010,Frederick W. Lanchester Prize of INFORMS in 2007.Lanchester Prize citation
,

INFORMS The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics. It was established in 1995 with the merger o ...

, retrieved 2013-01-23. He became a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009, and of

in 2010. He was elected to the

in 2011. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

Selected publications

Books

*''Combinatorial Optimization'' (with William Cunningham, William R. Pulleyblank, and

Alexander Schrijver Alexander (Lex) Schrijver (born 4 May 1948 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of discrete mathematics and optimization at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in ...

, John Wiley and Sons, 1998)
2011 pbk reprint
*''The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study'' (with David L. Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, and

Václav Chvátal Václav (Vašek) Chvátal () is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published e ...

, Princeton University Press, 2006; Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, 2007) *'' In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation'', Princeton University Press, 2012.

References

External links

Home page

Google scholar profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cook, William John 1957 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American operations researchers Rutgers University alumni Stanford University alumni University of Waterloo alumni Cornell University faculty Columbia University faculty Academic staff of the University of Bonn Rice University faculty Georgia Tech faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences