Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications - Special Issue: Optimization, Control and Their Applications

Professor Boris Teodorovich Polyak was born on May 4, 1935 and passed away on February 3, 2023. This SI is dedicated to his memory and celebrates his fundamental achievements in Optimization, Control, and Their Applications. Professor Polyak was a world leader in these domains being a founder of several scientific schools. In particular, he was the first who thought on acceleration of the Gradient Method by suggesting a momentum idea (Heavy Ball Method).  He proposed several variants of the subgradient method, which form the basis of the modern theory of Nonsmooth Optimization.  His interpretation of Modified Lagrangians paved a way for proper understanding of this technique. Several, by now classical, notions of modern Optimization, such as, uniformly convex functions, gradient-dominated functions, sharp minimum, and many more, were proposed in his papers.  Finally, his famous book “Introduction to Optimization” (1983) fixed the state of art for the first period in the development of Optimization Theory and highlighted the most interesting directions for further research.

In Control Theory, Professor Polyak was a major player in robust control theory and its applications, stochastic methods in control, well-posedness in optimal control and the calculus of variations, etc. He was a member of the JOTA Editorial Board for many decades.             

Guest Editors:
Boris Mordukhovich, Wayne State University, boris@math.wayne.edu (this opens in a new tab)
Arkadi Nemirovski, Georgia Institute of Technology, nemirovs@isye.gatech.edu (this opens in a new tab)
Yurii Nesterov, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, nesterov@core.ucl.ac.be (this opens in a new tab)

Submission deadline:  September 30, 2023