Thomas Liebling

Thomas M. Liebling (http://roso.epfl.ch) is Mathematics Professor Emeritus at EPFL (Lausanne), where he taught from 1980 to 2008 and directed the OR group ROSO.

He served on the jury of 112 PhD and habilitation theses, 39 as director. He further supervised 150 MS theses and 350 term projects, many of which in collaboration with industry and private and public services. He published over 200 refereed papers, books, and book chapters.

Previous appointments were with ETHZ, and RPI; as visiting professor with Cornell, ELTE-Budapest, MIT, PUC-Rio, and Stanford.

He received his education from ETH Zurich:

MS in EE (1966, automatic control),

PhD in operations research (1969; awarded the ETH prize and medal).

Mathematics habilitation (1973) with a pioneering probabilistic study on the number of iterations of the simplex method.

Postdoctoral fellowship (1970/71) Stanford University with G.B. Dantzig

He holds the Science Prize of the German OR Society, is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Scientific Council of ZIB, Berlin.

He received a honorary degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima and the Medal of Merit from EPN Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito.

Editorial activities: DE (Optimization and Networks) of Management Science, AE of Operations Research, OR-letters, OR-Spectrum, EJOR, Discrete Applied Optimization, and Math. Programming, recurring guest-editor of MPB and DAM.

He is Editor in Chief of the MOS-SIAM book series on optimization.

He is a founding organizer of the Aussois Workshops in Combinatorial Optimization, and member of the steering committee of LAGOS (Latin American Graphs, Optimizstion Symposium) chaired the MPS Publications Committee, Tucker Prize Committee, and presently chairs its Symposium Advisory Committee. He organized ISMP 1997 at EPFL, with nearly 1500 participants from 63 countries, the largest to date. He has chaired the Conference of Department Chairmen (a position comparable to a provost), the Computer Commission (responsible for the introduction at EPFL of the first Swiss supercomputer), and further chaired the Research Commission over 6 years, he created the Doctoral Award and was its first Jury chair. He belonged to the Board of Trustees of the Swiss National Science Foundation .

Much of his research lies at the interface with other disciplines (physics, life sciences, materials science, management, engineering, logistics), focusing on complex systems modeling, simulation, and optimization.

His present research interests are in algorithmic game theory and complex particle system modeling and simulation using paradigms from mathematical programming, discrete geometry and probability.