2012 Beale — Orchard-Hays Prize Citation

Michael Grant and Stephen Boyd,
"CVX: Matlab software for disciplined convex programming, version 1.21",
http://cvxr.com/cvx, April 2011

Michael Grant and Stephen Boyd,
"Graph Implementations for Nonsmooth Convex Programs"
in Recent Advances in Learning and Control, V. Blondel, S. Boyd and H. Kimura (eds), pp. 95-110,
Lecture Notes in Control and Informational Sciences, Springer, 2008.

In a unanimous decision, the selection committee (Michael Ferris (Chair), Philip Gill, Tim Kelley, Jon Lee) for the Beale — Orchard-Hays Prize for 2012 decided that the award be given to Michael Grant and Stephen Boyd for the software CVX as described in the above papers.

The nomination states that "CVX is a modeling language for convex programming that has been implemented in Matlab. It also automatically links to semidefinite solvers ... CVX makes convex programming as easy as Matlab makes matrix computation." The committee feels that this work is very well respected within our community and is used extensively for both research and teaching at a number of high-profile institutions. In particular, it provides a unique, well-documented tool for prototyping and exploring existing and emerging applications of convex optimization.

This Prize is sponsored by the Society in memory of Martin Beale and William Orchard-Hays, pioneers in computational mathematical programming. The Prize is given for excellence in any aspect of computational mathematical programming. "Computational mathematical programming" includes the development of high-quality mathematical programming algorithms and software, the experimental evaluation of mathematical programming algorithms, and the development of new methods for the empirical testing of mathematical programming techniques.