The Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering is honored to have Drs. William Cook, Ellis Johnson, and George Nemhauser named as inaugural Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Founded in 1951, SIAM encourages the development of mathematical and computational methodologies in manufacturing, research, consulting, and governmental organizations through the promulgation of annual journals, books, and conferences. Each year, SIAM designates approximately 0.4% of its 12,000 members as Fellows in recognition of their outstanding contributions in the application of mathematics to industry.

To be considered for admission into the SIAM Fellows Program, an individual must have been a SIAM member for at least five years and must have possessed a doctorate degree for at least fifteen years. The SIAM Awards Committee then evaluates nominees based on their curriculum vitae, their affiliation with prominent national academies, and their major academic awards.

Dr. Cook, Professor and Chandler Family Chair in ISyE since 2002, was honored "for contributions to the Traveling Salesman Problem and other combinatorial optimization problems." Previously, he was a Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University and at Rice University. Additionally, Cook held a professorship in the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics at the University of Bonn, Germany, from 1994 to 1995.

His editorial experience with the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS) dates back twenty years, and he served as the editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming between 1999 and 2007. He is currently the editor of Mathematical Programming Computation. Cook was honored with the 2007 Lanchester Prize for his research on the Traveling Salesman Problem. Previously, he was awarded the 2003 I.E. Block Community Lecturer Prize by SIAM and the 2000 Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize by MPS.

Dr. Johnson, Coca-Cola Chair and Professor in the Stewart School, was recognized for "contributions to combinatorial optimization and its application to logistical problems." Johnson joined the ISyE faculty in 1995, co-founding and co-directing the Logistics Engineering Center with Dr. Nemhauser. Prior to this, he worked for over 20 years at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, and he was named an IBM Corporate Fellow in 1990 for founding and managing the Optimization Center. He has also taught at the University of Bonn, Germany, as a recipient of the Alexander Von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award.

Johnson has been the recipient of numerous honors throughout his professional career. He was awarded the Dantzig Prize from SIAM in 1985 for his research in the field of mathematical programming. He received the Lanchester Prize in 1986 and the John Von Neumann Theory Prize in 2000 from the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), and he was admitted into the inaugural class of INFORMS Fellows in 2002. Furthermore, Johnson has been an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) since 1988.

Dr. Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor, was praised "for contributions to scheduling methodology and large-scale combinatorial optimization problems." Since 1985, he has held the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professorship in ISyE. Formerly, he was a professor in operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell University, where he also served as a school director from 1977 to 1983. He has held faculty positions at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Leeds, U.K., and the University of Louvain, Belgium.

Nemhauser's leadership in the field of operations research includes his co-directorship of Georgia Tech's Logistics Engineering Center, his chairmanship of the Mathematical Programming Society, and his editorship of Operations Research Letters and of Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science. Furthermore, Nemhauser has served the Operations Research Society of America as council member, president, and editor of Operations Research. He was inducted into the NAE in 1986, and he is a recipient of the 1988 Kimball Medal and a two-time recipient of the Lanchester Prize.

The Class of 2009 SIAM Fellows also included Dr. Prasad Tetali, Professor in the School of Mathematics, "for contributions to discrete mathematics and algorithms." For more information about the SIAM Fellows Program, please visit www.siam.org.