Invited lecture Monique Laurent at ICM 2014

Monique Laurent will give an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2014 on Wednesday 20 August in Seoul, Korea. It is a great honour to speak at ICM, the most important conference for mathematicians in the world, with thousands of participants and the award of the Fields Medals. The conference is organized every four years by the International Mathematical Union.

Monique Laurent is the leader of the Networks and Optimization research group at CWI and part-time full professor at Tilburg University. Her lecture at ICM 2014 is entitled 'Optimization over Polynomials: Selected Topic'. Polynomial functions are used in a broad range of applications in optimization, control and logistics (think of the travelling salesman problem). Recently researchers have developed new algorithmic approaches for optimizing over polynomials, by combining classical mathematical tools from algebra and analysis with modern semidefinite optimization solvers.

Laurent made the mathematical link between polynomial optimization problems, which are continuous, and applications in combinatorial optimization - which is discrete. She also made fundamental contributions toward understanding how fast the optimum solution can be found when optimizing polynomials over structured geometric regions. These achievements make that several difficult problems can be solved faster and with better approximations than before.

More information:

- Movie of the ICM2014 Lecture by Monique Laurent
- Homepage of Monique Laurent
- Networks and Optimization group at CWI
- Laurent’s survey "Sums of Squares, Moment Matrices and Optimization Over Polynomials" - a book chapter in this book
- Day program of Lecture series nr. 16 (Control Theory and Optimization) at ICM 2014
- ICM 2014 website