Biography
Graduated from "Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et Mathematiques Appliquees" (ENSIMAG) in Grenoble, then got my PhD (1978) and "Doctorat d'Etat" (1984) degrees both from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (France). I have been at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse since 1980, where I am currently Directeur de Recherche éméritus. I am also an associate member of Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), the Institute of Mathematics of Toulouse (IMT), and hold the ``Polynomial Optimization" chair at the ANITI Institute (one of the four recently created Artificial Intelligence Institutes in France).
Twice a one-year visitor (1978-79 and 1985-86) at the Electrical Engineering Department. of the University of California at Berkeley with a fellowship from INRIA and NSF. I have done several one-month visits to Stanford University (Stanford, California), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, Berkeley), the Fields Institute (Fields, Toronto), the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA, Minneapolis), the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM, UCLA), Cinvestav-IPN (Cinvestav, Mexico), Leiden University (Leiden, The Netherlands), the Tinbergen Institute (Tinbergen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), the University of Adelaide (Adelaide, Australia), the University of South Australia (UniSA, Adelaide), the University of New South wales (UNSW, Sydney), the University of British Columbia (UBC, Vancouver).
Awards & Distinctions:
- Grand Prix INRIA-Académie des Sciences 2021
- ISSAC' 2019 Distinguished Paper Award (Beijing, July 2019) with Florent Bréhard and Mioara Joldès
- Simons CRM Professor at the CRM in Montreal (October 2019)
- Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2018), Rio de Janeiro, August 2018: Section 16: Control Theory & Optimization.
- 2015 John von Neumann Theory prize of the INFORMS society
- 2015 L. Khachiyan prize of the Optimization Society of INFORMS
- 2009 Lagrange prize in Continuous optimization (awarded jointly every 3 years by SIAM and the Mathematical Optimization Society)
- SIAM Fellow (class 2014)
- 2014 Laureate of an ERC-Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the TAMING project.
Author/co-author of about 190 papers and the books:
- An Integrated Approach in Production Planning and Scheduling, (with S. Dauzères-Péres), Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, Springer, Berlin 1994
- Discrete-Time Markov Control Processes: Basic Optimality Criteria (with O. Hernandez-Lerma), Springer, New York, 1996
- Further Topics in Discrete-Time Markov Control Processes (with O. Hernandez-Lerma), Springer, New York, 1999
- Markov Chains and Invariant Probabilities, (with O. Hernandez-Lerma), Birkhauser, 2003
- Linear & Integer Programming vs Linear Integration and Counting", Springer, New York, 2009
- Moments, Positive Polynomials and Their Applications, Imperial College Press, London, 2009
- Modern Optimization Modelling Techniques (with R. Cominetti and F. Facchinei), Springer, New York, 2012
- An Introduction to Polynomial and Semi-Algebraic Optimization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2015
- The Moment-SOS Hierarchy: Lectures in Probability, Statistics, Computational Geometry, Control and Non-Linear PDEs, (with D. Henrion and M. Korda), World Scientific, Singapore, 2020, ISBN: 978-1-78634-853-1
- The Christoffel-Darboux Kernel for Data Analysis, (with E. Pauwels and M. Putinar), Cambridge University Press, 2022
Co-editor of the books:
- Geometric and Numerical Foundations of Movements, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, New York, 2017 (with J-P. Laumond and N. Mansard)
- Handbook of Semidefinite, Conic and Polynomial Optimization, Springer, New York, 2011 (with M. Anjos)
- Markov Decision Processes: Part I and II, J.C. Baltzer, Scientific Publishing Company, Basel, 1991 (with O. Hernandez-Lerma)