Tor Myklebust receives an Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies honour

Tor Myklebust is the recipient of a 2016 University of Waterloo Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies (Doctoral) designation. This honour was awarded at the Spring 2016 convocation ceremony on June 17. Previous C&O recipients of the honour include Harmony Zhan (M.Math. 2015), Marcel Silva (Ph.D. 2014), Mathieu Guay-Paquet (Ph.D. 2013), and Peter Nelson (Ph.D. 2012)

Tor completed his Ph.D. thesis On Primal-Dual Interior-Point Algorithms for Convex Optimization under the supervision of Professor Levent Tuncel. The main theoretical contribution of the thesis is the design and analysis of a primal-dual interior-point method for general convex optimization that is "primal-dual symmetric" - if arithmetic is done exactly, the sequence of iterates generated is invariant under interchange of primal and dual problems. The thesis also presents an adaptation of the Mizuno-Todd-Ye method for linear optimization to hyperbolicity cone optimization and its software implementation.

During his undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo, Tor received an Honourable Mention in the 2006 Putnam Mathematics Competition, and was a member of the university's bronze medal-winning team at the 2006 and 2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition World Finals. He also served as President of the Computer Science Club in Fall 2005. In 2008, he was a co-coach of the university's bronze medal-winning team at the ACM World Finals.