David P. Williamson
Biography
David P. Williamson is a Professor at Cornell University in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT under Professor Michel X. Goemans in 1993. After a postdoc at Cornell under Professor Éva Tardos, he was a Research Staff Member for IBM Research at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. From 2000 to 2003, he was the Senior Manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies group at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He moved to Cornell University in 2004.
His research focuses on finding efficient algorithms for hard discrete optimization problems, with a focus on approximation algorithms for problems in network design, facility location, and scheduling. Other interests include algorithms for information networks.
Research Interests
Professor Williamson works in the area of discrete optimization. In particular, he designs efficient heuristics with provable performance guarantees for NP-hard optimization problems; these heuristics are known as approximation algorithms. He has worked on approximation algorithms for a broad range of problems of interest in the operations research community, including network design, scheduling, facility location, clustering, ranking, and other related problems. Currently he is focusing his research efforts on the traveling salesman problem and on simple approximation algorithms.
Teaching Interests
Williamson has taught a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including ENGRI 1101, an introduction to operations research for first-year students; ORIE 1380, an introduction to data science for students unfamiliar with programming and statistics; ORIE 3310, a second semester optimization course for juniors; ORIE 6330, a graduate-level course on network flows; and ORIE 6334, a graduate-level course on spectral graph theory and algorithms.
Service Interests
Williamson served as Chair of the Department of Information Science from July 2021 through December 2023. He is the former Editor-in-Chief for the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.
Selected Publications
- Henzinger, Monka, Billy Jin, Richard Peng, David P Williamson. 2023. A Combinatorial Cut-Toggling Algorithm for Solving Laplacian Systems. Algorithmica 85:3680-3716.
- Gutekunst, Samuel C, David P Williamson. 2022. Semidefinite Programming Relaxations of the Traveling Salesman Problem and Their Integrality Gaps. Mathematics of Operations Research 47:1-28.
- Paul, Alice, Daniel Freund, Aaron Ferber, David B Shmoys, David P Williamson. 2020. Budgeted Prize-Collecting Traveling Salesman and Minimum Spanning Tree Problems. Mathematics of Operations Research 45:576-590.
- Williamson, David P. 2019. Network Flow Algorithms. Cambridge University Press. New York, NY, United States.
- Williamson, David P., David Shmoys. 2011. The Design of Approximation Algorithms. : Cambridge University Press. New York, NY, United States.
Selected Awards and Honors
- American Mathematical Society Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research 2022
- SIAM Fellow (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) 2016
- ACM Fellow (Association for Computing Machinery) (ACM) 2013
- Lanchester Prize for best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English (INFORMS) 2013
- Professor of the Year (ORIE Undergraduate Voted) (ORIE) 2018
Education
- B.S. (Mathematics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989
- M.S. (Computer & Information Science), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990
- Ph.D. (Computer & Information Science), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993