Dimitri Bertsekas

Brief Biography

Born in Athens, Greece, Dimitri Bertsekas is a Saul Gass Expository Writing Award laureate. Bertsekas spent five years at the National Technical University of Athens. Though he once confessed to spending the majority of his college years playing poker and chess, he was a successful student and moved to the United States to study electrical engineering at the graduate level. In 1969, he graduated with as masters in the subject from George Washington University, where he had been working as a research engineer. Two years later, Bertsekas received a PhD in systems science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. H spent eight years, first at Stanford and then at the University of Illinois, prior to joining the Electrical Engineering and Computing Science Department at MIT.

Bertsekas is a prolific writer, having published sixteen textbooks and monographs in optimization and control as well as applied probability. He published his first book, Dynamic Programming and Stochastic Control, in 1976. This first-year graduate level text was well received for its substantial contribution to the teaching of the theory and application of stochastic control in a mathematically elegant, but not difficult, manner.  In 1995, Bertsekas co-founded Athena Scientific, a publishing company that has since gone on to publish most of his books. Bertsekas’s most recent title, Convex Optimization Algorithms, published in 2015, aims at an up-to-date and accessible development of algorithms for solving convex optimization problems.  His body of works has been cited in over sixty-eight thousand publications.

Over the course of his career, Bertsekas has received a number of awards and honors. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 and has received the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) Computing Society Prize. Bertsekas was named the recipient of the 2009 Saul Gass Expository Writing Award. The selection committee praised him for his entire corpus of works in which he presents rigorous mathematics in a clear, accessible style.  His publications on dynamic programming and stochastic control received exceptional praise as they exemplify his dedication to bridge the multiple disciplines he has investigated.

In 2014, Bertsekas received both the Khachiyan Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society and the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Prize of the American Automatic Control Council. He was cited “for contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control.” Among his many other interests, Bertsekas developed a passion for digital photography, capturing sensational images from across the globe.

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for Dimitri Bertsekas

Massachusetts Institute of Technology People. Dimitri P. Bertsekas: Biographical Sketch. Accessed June 5, 2015. (link)