Professor Aharon Ben-Tal

General Information

Prof. Ben-Tal's first degree, at Tel-Aviv University, was a double major in Statistics and Economics. His second degree, also at Tel-Aviv University was in Statistics, specializing in Operations Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University, U.S.A. After two years of postdoctoral work at McGill University (Montreal) and University of Texas (Austin), he joined the Technion's Computer Science Faculty in 1975, moving in 1981 to the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty, where he served as Dean from 1989-92. Prof. Ben-Tal has held visiting positions at the University of Copenhagen, University of Michigan,  Delft University of Technology.Princeton, MIT and other North American universities.

Research Summary

Prof. Ben-Tal's research work is mainly in the area of nonlinear optimization. He published over 100 papers and 2 books (a third is forthcoming). His theoretical work is concerned with extremum principles for problems in a general setting, with regard to the underlying decision space, and the underlying smoothness of the functionals. He was among the first to develop a comprehensive theory of second-order optimality conditions for nondifferential problems.

Prof. Ben-Tal is also involved in research in stochastic mathematical programming. He introduced the concept of entropic-penalty for problems with randomness in the constraints, and developed a duality theory which established a link between stochastic programming and the Expected Utility principle in economics. Recently he developed, together with Prof. A. Nemirovski, the Robust Optimization methodology. The focus of Prof. Ben-Tal's work in recent years is in computational methods for solving large-scale continuous optimization problems. The algorithms he develops are used in designing optimally complex engineering structures, water distribution networks, and techniques for medical image reconstruction. The above projects are carried out in the MINERVA Optimization Center, a 1 million euro endowed research center headed by Prof. Ben-Tal.

Prof. Ben-Tal was a member of the International Council of the Mathematical Programming Society. He served as Area Editor of the journal Mathematics of Operations Research, and Associae Editor for Math. Programming and SIAM Optimization.He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Convex Analysis,J.Optimization and Engineering and European J. of Oprations Research.. He received Awards of Excellence from the Technion both for research and for teaching. In 2007 Prof. Ben-Tal was awarded the EURO Gold Medal-the highesr distinction for Operations Research within Europe.

Current Research Projects

Convex analysis, nonsmooth optimization

Robust optimization

Algorithms for large-scale nonlinear programming

Optimal engineering design

Medical Imaging

Selected Publications