A New Flat Map and Imaging Exoplanets

Robert Vanderbei, PhD
Professor
Princeton University

Abstract: I will discuss how optimization plays a central role in two areas of research that I’m interested in. One is how to make a flat map of a sphere that minimizes distortions and the other is how to design the optics for a space telescope that will be able to directly image Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars.

Biography: Robert Vanderbei is a Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. From 2005 to 2012, he was chair of the department. In addition, he holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Mathematics, Astrophysics, Computer Science, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He is also a member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, is a founding member of the Bendheim Center for Finance, and a former Director of the Engineering and Management Systems Program. Beyond Princeton, he is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Society for Applied and Industrial Mathematics (SIAM) and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Within INFORMS, he has served as President of the Optimization Society and the Computing Society and is the 2017 winner of the Khachiyan Prize for his work in optimization. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the journal Mathematical Programming Computation. He has degrees in Chemistry (BS), Operations Research and Statistics (MS), and Applied Mathematics (MS, PhD). After receiving his PhD from Cornell (1981), he was an NSF postdoc at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences (NYU) for one year, then a lecturer in the Mathematics Department at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign for two years before joining Bell Labs in 1984. At Bell Labs he made fundamental contributions to the field of optimization and holds three patents for his inventions. In 1990, he left Bell Labs to join Princeton University where he has been since. In addition to hundreds of research papers, he has written four books: (i) a textbook entitled Linear Programming: Foundations and Extensions now in its fifth edition and published by Springer, (ii) Welcome To The Universe in 3D, an astronomy book written jointly with Neil deGrasse Tyson, J. Richard Gott and Michael Strauss and published by Princeton University Press, (iii), an introductory astronomy book written jointly with J. Richard Gott and published by National Geographic, and (iv) Real and Convex Analysis, a textbook written jointly with Erhan Cinlar and published by Springer.

Attendance is mandatory for in-person seminar students. For online and part-time students, seminars will be recorded and made available through Canvas.