Georgia Tech professor recognized for field-shaping breakthroughs in continuous optimization
BALTIMORE, Oct. 22, 2025—INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics, announced that Renato D.C. Monteiro, Ph.D. of Georgia Tech has been awarded the 2025 John von Neumann Theory Prize—one of the organization’s highest honors.
The John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded annually to a scholar (or scholars in the case of joint work) who has made fundamental, sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences.
The prize is awarded for a body of work, typically published over a period of several years, reflecting contributions that have stood the test of time. The criteria for the prize include significance, innovation, depth and scientific excellence.
Renato D.C. Monteiro has been a singular force in continuous optimization, blending elegant mathematical theory with practical algorithm design. His contributions have reshaped optimization, advanced complexity analysis and made once-intractable problems solvable across science, engineering and data-driven fields.
Among Monteiro’s most influential achievements are the polynomial-time analysis of higher-order interior-point methods, short-step primal-dual algorithms that became foundational for large-scale convex optimization and the Monteiro-Zhang search direction family, which unified interior-point methods for semidefinite programming and resolved long-standing theoretical questions. His work with Samuel Burer produced the Burer-Monteiro low-rank method, which transformed semidefinite programming from an abstract theory into a practical tool, enabling breakthroughs in combinatorial optimization, machine learning, control systems and statistical modeling. His associated open-source solver remains a standard across disciplines including chemical and electrical engineering, computer vision and statistical learning.
Monteiro’s influence also extends to distributed and large-scale optimization, with pioneering contributions to the complexity of the ADMM method and advances in linear complementarity, central path curvature and statistical dimension reduction. Beyond research, he has strengthened the community through professional service, editorial leadership and a deep commitment to mentoring the next generation of scholars.
“Renato Monteiro’s work has transformed the landscape of optimization theory,” said INFORMS Executive Director Elena Gerstmann. “His ideas—both profound and practical—have set new standards for the field and continue to shape how we solve some of the most complex challenges of our time.”
The John von Neumann Theory Prize will be presented at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, October 26–29. The award includes a $5,000 cash prize, a medal and a formal citation.
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