Professor Bill Cook will received the designation University Professor at the June 12 convocation ceremony. This designation recognizes exceptional scholarly achievement and international pre-eminence by professors at the University of Waterloo.
Bill is one of the world's leading researchers in discrete optimization and integer programming. His contributions have been broad and deep, theoretical and applied, analytical and computational, and have extended over many years. He is well known for his contributions to the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). His first book, The Traveling Salesman: A Computational Study, coauthored with David Applegate, Robert Bixby and Vasek Chvátal, provided many new theoretical and computational results, but at the same time presenting a beautiful overview of the subject. The work has had tremendous impact outside of the traveling salesman problem, since many techniques introduced there were extended, by the authors and by others, to mixed integer linear programming. His 2012 book, In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation was positively reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New York Journal of Books, and American Scientist. He has also written the state-of-the-art Concorde software for the TSP.
Bill was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, and is also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a SIAM Fellow. He presented an invited lecture at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), and is a recipient of the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize in 2000 and the Lanchester Prize in 2007. Bill has served as the Editor-in Chief of all three publications of the Mathematical Optimization Society:Mathematical Programming, Series A, Mathematical Programming, Series B, and Mathematical Programming Computation. He currently serves as Chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society.