Biography
Michael J. Todd is the Leon C. Welch Professor Emeritus in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. After serving as a lecturer and assistant professor of operations research and planning at the University of Ottawa from 1971-1973, he joined the Cornell’s School of Operations Research and Information Engineering faculty in 1973 – first as an assistant professor before being promoted to associate professor and full professor. He earned his Ph.D. in administrative sciences from Yale University in 1972 and his B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University, England in 1968.
Todd’s research interests are in algorithms for linear and convex programming, particularly semidefinite programming and ellipsoid optimization. He is interested in developing and analyzing interior-point methods. Previous research interests include homotopy methods, probabilistic analysis of pivoting methods, and extensions of complementary pivoting ideas to oriented matroids.
Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015, he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize at the Institute for Operations Research and the
Management Sciences Annual Meeting in 2003, the Mathematical Programming Society and SIAM George B. Dantzig Prize (1988), Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (1981-85), and the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1980-81).
In addition to serving as Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell from 1986-89, he was a member of the U.S. National Committee for Mathematics (1992-93), co-organizer, American Mathematical Society-Institute of Mathematical Sciences-Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Summer Research Conference (Bowdoin, 1988), and the SIAM Conference on Optimization (1989, 2014).
A Fellow of both INFORMS and SIAM, Todd also served as chair of the SIAM Activity Group in Optimization (2011-2014), chair of the Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics (2005-08) and Board of Directors (2008-11), and was a member of the Mathematical Optimization Society.