Michel Goemans

Bio/CV

Short bio

Michel Goemans is the RSA Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Head of the Department of Mathematics since July 2017 (interim, the first year). He was the Leighton Family Professor of Mathematics from 2007 to 2017. He has held an Adjunct Professorship at the University of Waterloo, a Professorship at the University of Louvain and a visiting Professorship at RIMS, Kyoto.

His research --- in the areas of discrete algorithms and combinatorial optimization --- has been rewarded by several prizes, in particular the 2022 Steele Prize, the 2021 George B. Dantzig Prize, the 2012 Farkas Prize, the 2000 AMS-MPS Fulkerson Prize and twice the SIAM Optimization prize. He has been an invited speaker at many conferences, including the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998. He has been on the program committee of several major theoretical computer science conferences, such as chair of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Fellow of AMS, ACM and SIAM. He holds a Doctor Honoris Causa from UC Louvain, Belgium.

Current academic positions

• RSA Professor of Mathematics, MIT.
• Head, Department of Mathematics, MIT, since 2017.
• Faculty member, MIT CSAIL.
• Faculty member, MIT ORC.

Honors and awards (partial list)

• Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research, 2022.
• George B. Dantzig Prize, 2021.
• Farkas Prize for mid-career researchers in Optimization, 2012.
• AMS Fellow, American Mathematical Society, 2013.
• SIAM Fellow, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2013.
• ACM Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery, 2008.
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, 2007.
• Collins Distinguished Scholar Award, MIT Mathematics Department, 2006-2007.
• Akamai Fellow, 2002.
• Delbert Ray Fulkerson prize (AMS + MPS), 2000.
• SIAM Optimization Prize, 1999.
• IBM Partnership award, 1999.
• Invited speaker, ICM, Berlin, 1998.
• SIAM Optimization Prize, 1996.
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, 1995.

Professional service

Long to list... full CV available upon request.

Various conference involvement (chair, organizer, or program committee) includes: APPROX '17, STOC '15 IPCO '13, ICIAM '11, APPROX '09, ISMP '09, SIOPT '08, IPCO '08, STOC '07, STOC '03, IPCO '01, APPROX '01, ESA '99, STOC '97, STOC '96, and a bunch of other ones without acronyms/websites, such as an Oberwolfach workshop on Combinatorial Optimization (2011) or an IPAM workshop on Discrete Optimization (2010).

Consulting experience

Available upon request.

Personal info

American & Belgian citizen, born December 1964. Enjoys sailing.

site info

© 2009 Michel Goemans | Original design by Andreas Viklund