EURO GOLD MEDAL 2009

Bonn, Germany, July 6, 2009

Mr Chairman, Dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have the honor to present to you the decision of the Jury of the EURO Gold Medal 2009, composed of the following scientists:

• Aharon Ben-Tal (Israel)
• Onno Boxma (The Netherlands)
• Georg Pflug (Austria)
• András Prékopa, chair (Hungary)
• Laurence Wolsey (Belgium).

Until April 30, 2009 altogether 12 nominations have been made for four excellent OR scientists. After detailed study of the files and a long discussion the Jury decided to award two of them EURO Gold Medals 2009.

The first laureate is not a young man, belongs to the first generation of the international OR community, obtained basic results that shaped the face of optimization already in its early history, was a leading member of one of the first and world famous OR groups that, in addition to methodological innovation, carried out a number of successful applications. Ladies and Gentlemen, this OR scientist, EURO Gold Medal laureate is

Jacques F. Benders,

Professor emeritus of Eindhoven University of Technology.

Jacques Benders was born on June 1, 1924 in Swalmen, The Netherlands. He received his education from Bisschopelijk College and the University of Utrecht. He received the doctor diploma in mathematics, physics and mechanics in 1952.

In 1955 he joined the Royal Shell Laboratory in Amsterdam. He was working on refinery planning and modeling problems. Through collaboration with Shell California he became aware of the new results in optimization. He implemented the simplex method to solve problems in the petrochemical industry but observed that some of the real life problems could more realistically be modeled by the introduction of discrete variables. This lead him to the creation of the celebrated Benders decomposition method for the solution of specially structured mathematical programming problems. He published it in 1962, shortly after the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition method had been created. Benders’ method is variable oriented and allows for applications beyond linear programming. It is widely applied in integer, nonlinear, combinatorial, stochastic programming and network problems. In integer programming the importance of Benders’ decomposition is comparable with Gomory’s methods and is suitable for application in problems, where some of the variables take their values from an arbitrary discrete set. Benders’ decomposition can efficiently solve specially structured linear and mixed variable optimization problems of large sizes that are non-tractable by other methodologies. It is one of the greatest achievements in the history of optimization. Benders also produced pioneering works in applications and software development. Theory, modeling and software development form a harmonious unity in Benders’ activities.

In 1965 Benders became full professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he spent about 26 years. He had great influence in the Dutch OR community in many ways. He did not publish many papers but among them there is one, about his decomposition procedure, that can produce several hundred thousand hits on the internet in less than a second. He is one of the greatest OR scientists who truly deserves the EURO Gold Medal.

The second EURO Gold Medal 2009 laureate is specialist in stochastics, where he also uses advanced optimization technique. He is from the second generation of the OR community but he has created groundbreaking methodology in stochastic network analysis, optimization and their applications. This man is

Frank P. Kelly,

Professor of Christ's College and Cambridge University, UK.

Frank Kelly was born on December 28, 1950 in London. He received his education in mathematics and economics from Durham University and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Since 1976 he has been teaching at various institutions at the University of Cambridge.

As a Ph.D. student Kelly made path-breaking contributions to the theory of queueing networks. His 1979 book on Reversibility and Stochastic Networks has become a classic in the field. He is the editor of several more books and the author of 100, often highly influential, papers. His main results are on stochastic processes, their networks and optimization, design and control of such large-scale systems with applications in telecommunication and other engineering problems. His works are inspired by performance issues in communication networks but the concepts he has developed are widely applied in other disciplines. During the years between 2003 and 2006 he was given part time appointment as Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department of Transport of the British Government, transferring his knowledge on routing and pricing in communication networks to road traffic networks.

Kelly has served the OR community in many ways: as editor of a large number of journals, as adviser of various industrial and academic research institutes and as member of several academic and review committees. He has, among others, received the Lanchaster Prize, the Naylor Prize, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the INFORMS John von Neumann Prize of the Theory. He also has several patents, which show that he was able to combine high level theory and real world applications in an efficient way. He is one of the greatest OR personalities and truly deserves the EURO Gold Medal 2009.

András Prékopa
EURO Gold Medal 2009 jury chair