Arkadi Nemirovski, John Hunter Chair and Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, will be awarded an Honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, during its spring convocation on June 12, 2009.

Included among university chancellors and other distinguished scientists, Nemirovski will receive one of 13 honorary doctorates granted by the University of Waterloo for his innovations in optimization theory and algorithms. A fundamental contributor to continuous optimization, Nemirovski was the first individual to have won all three of the top scholarly prizes in his field. He was awarded the Fulkerson Prize in 1982 for work leading to the ellipsoid method and contributing to the proof of polynomial-time solvability of linear programming. He received the Dantzig Prize in 1991 for investigating performance limits of convex optimization methods and developing efficient algorithms and in 2003, he accepted the John von Neumann Theory Prize for contributions to the general theory of polynomial-time interior-point methods and the development of robust optimization.

Nemirovski earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Moscow State University in 1973 and the Doctor of Sciences in Mathematics from the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics in 1990. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 2005, he was a chaired full professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and between 2000 and 2004, he also conducted research at the University of Waterloo as an Adjunct Visiting Professor. Since joining the Stewart School of ISyE, he has received a courtesy appointment in the School of Mathematics as an Adjunct Professor.

Arkadi Nemirovski is the second Stewart School faculty member to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in as many years. Dr. C. F. Jeff Wu, Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and formerly a Waterloo professor, received an honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree and addressed the convocation at the commencement ceremony in June 2008.