School of Mathematics

SIGEST award for Peter Richtarik and Olivier Fercoq

Peter Richtarik, a Lecturer at the School of Mathematics, and his colleague and former postdoc Olivier Fercoq, now Assistant Professor at Telecom ParisTech, will receive the SIGEST Award of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for their paper "Accelerated, parallel and proximal coordinate descent".

The winning paper will be reprinted in the SIGEST section of SIAM Review (Volume 58, Issue 4, 2016), the flagship journal of the society. A paper from SIOPT is chosen for the SIGEST award about once every two or three years. Dr Richtarik and Dr Fercoq will receive the award at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh in July 2017.

According to C. T. Kelley, editor-in-chief of SIAM Review, "SIGEST highlights a recent paper from one of SIAM's specialized research journals, chosen on the basis of exceptional interest to the entire SIAM community… The purpose of SIGEST is to make the 10,000+ readers of SIAM Review aware of exceptional papers published in SIAM's specialized journals. In each issue of SIAM Review, the SIGEST section contains an outstanding paper of general interest that has previously appeared in one of SIAM's specialized research journals; the issues rotate through the journals. We begin the selection by asking the editor-in-chief of the appropriate journal to send a short list of nominees, usually nominated by the associate editors. Then, the SIAM Review section editors make the final selection."

Kelley further writes: "In this case, your paper was recommended by members of the SIOPT editorial board and the editor in chief of the journal, and was selected by the SIREV editors for the importance of its contributions and topic, its clear writing style, and its accessibility for the SIAM community."

The same paper has also recently won the 17th Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis (2nd Prize, 2015), awarded biennially by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA).