Robert Weismantel

The 2015 Farkas Prize is awarded to Robert Weismantel for his significant and fundamental contributions to the field of discrete mathematics and optimization.  
Robert Weismantel's work has given valuable new insights into primal, cutting-plane, and algebraic methods for integer optimization.  He is a coauthor of a seminal paper that initiated the study of a unifying theory for cutting planes for mixed-integer linear optimization, a research area to which he subsequently obtained important results, most notably on the geometry of integral lattice-free polyhedra, the polyhedrality of closures, and the finite convergence to the integer hull of such iterated closures. He is one of the pioneers in the extremely difficult area of nonlinear integer programming.  He is a coauthor of groundbreaking papers that harness the use of rational generating functions for the optimization of multivariate polynomial functions over integer and mixed-integer points in polyhedra in polynomial time. He is also coauthor of papers that apply Graver bases methods for solution of broad classes of large nonlinear integer programming problems in polynomial time. He has coauthored a book on integer optimization that provides a clear exposition of integer programming with an emphasis on primal methods, integer programs in fixed dimension, and Barvinok's theory of lattice points in polytopes.

Selection committee

Ariela Sofer (chair), Warren Adams, Sanjay Mehrotra, Zelda Zabinski