Professor Andrew (Andy) Conn passed away in his sleep on March 14, 2019.
Professor Conn's research interests were extensive but centered in mathematical programming. They were typically motivated by algorithms, and included convergence analysis, theory, applications and software. Although predominately devoted to continuous nonlinear optimization, he had an ongoing interest in applications that involved linear and discrete problems. In particular, he looked at the special structure of the problems and adapted continuous optimization techniques to their solution. In the last several years he was especially involved in large-scale nonlinear optimization and, in particular, was a co-author of the large-scale nonlinear programming package LANCELOT and the important and popular testing environment CUTE. Moreover, he had a great interest in applications of optimization to complex problems, especially those involving simulation. In particular, with Michael Henderson and Chandu Visweswariah he had been applying nonlinear optimization to circuit tuning problems. The systems they developed have successfully handled problems with thousands of nonlinear variables and constraints, and made a significant impact on IBM's circuit design.
At the University of Waterloo, Professor Conn supervised 10 Ph.D. students. Among these were Tom Coleman, Paul Calamai, and Yuying Li, who are presently professors in the Departments of Combinatorics & Optimization, Systems Design Engineering, and Computer Science at Waterloo.