Daniel Dadush, an Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) PhD student at Georgia Tech based in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), was selected as the winner of the 2011 INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize for his paper “On the Chvatal-Gomory Closure of a Compact Convex Set.”  The paper was co-authored with Santanu Dey, assistant professor in ISyE, and Juan Pablo Vielma, who received his PhD from ISyE in 2009 and was the 2007 recipient of the Optimization Society Student Paper Prize. Vielma is currently the assistant professor in the department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. The prize is awarded annually at the INFORMS Fall National Meeting for an outstanding paper in optimization by a student author.

The citation reads:

"The paper shows that the Chvátal-Gomory closure of compact convex sets is a rational polytope. For the special case of rational polytopes, this is a well-known result. The new result includes the case of irrational polytopes and thus resolves a question that was posed by Schrijver (1980) and had remained open since. Solving this long-open question is already a wonderful contribution, finally completing the Chvátal-Gomory theory for polytopes. The paper goes beyond this and also provides a solution for arbitrary compact convex sets, completing the program started in a paper by Dey and Vielma (2010) for the case of ellipsoids and continued in an earlier paper by Dadush, Dey, and Vielma (2011) for the case of strictly convex bodies. The importance of this contribution lies in providing a foundation for a finite linear cutting plane theory for convex integer optimization.

The paper uses techniques from convex geometry and the geometry of numbers in an expertly way. In the proofs, the authors avoid explicit calculations in favor of soft analysis, including techniques from point-set topology, which makes the paper particularly elegant."

The 2011 INFORMS Annual Meeting was held at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, North Carolina on November 13, 2011.  INFORMS, the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (OR), management science, and business analytics, serves the scientific and professional needs of Operations Researchers and those in the Management Sciences including educators, scientists, students, managers, and consultants.