Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas (born 1942, Athens, ) is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.

Biography

Bertsekas was born in Greece and lived his childhood there. He studied for five years at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and studied for about a year and a half at The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., where he obtained his M.S. in electrical engineering in 1969, and for about two years at MIT, where he obtained his doctorate in system science in 1971. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1979, he taught for three years at the Engineering-Economic Systems Dept. of Stanford University, and for five years at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, he was appointed a full-time professor at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, Tempe, while maintaining a research position at MIT. He is known for his research work, and for his twenty textbooks and monographs in theoretical and algorithmic optimization and control, in reinforcement learning, and in applied probability. His work ranges from theoretical/foundational work, to algorithmic analysis and design for optimization problems, and to applications such as data communication and transportation networks, and electric power generation. He is featured among the top 100 most cited computer science authors in the CiteSeer search engine academic database and digital library. He is also ranked within the top 40 scientists in the world (top 20 in the USA) in the field of Engineering and Technology, and also ranked within the top 50 scientists in the world (top 30 in the USA) in the field of Mathematics. In 1995, he co-founded a publishing company, Athena Scientific, that among others, publishes most of his books. In the late 1990s Bertsekas developed a strong interest in digital photography. His photographs have been exhibited on several occasions at MIT.

Awards and honors

Bertsekas was elevated to the grade of IEEE fellow in 1984 for contributions to optimization, data communications networks, and distributed control. Bertsekas was awarded the INFORMS 1997 Prize for Research Excellence in the Interface Between Operations Research and Computer Science for his book "Neuro-Dynamic Programming" (co-authored with John N. Tsitsiklis); the 2000 Greek National Award for Operations Research; and the 2001 John R. Ragazzini Award for outstanding contributions to education. In 2001, he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering for "pioneering contributions to fundamental research, practice and education of optimization/control theory, and especially its application to data communication networks". In 2009, he was awarded the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award for his ability to "communicate difficult mathematical concepts with unusual clarity, thereby reaching a broad audience across many disciplines." In 2014 he received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Khachiyan Prize for life-time achievements in the area of optimization from the INFORMS Optimization Society. Also he received the 2015 Dantzig prize from SIAM and the Mathematical Optimization Society, the 2018 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize (jointly with Tsitsiklis) for the books "Neuro-Dynamic Programming" and "Parallel and Distributed Algorithms", and the 2022 IEEE Control Systems Award for “fundamental contributions to the methodology of optimization and control”, and “outstanding monographs and textbooks”.

Selected publications

Textbooks

Monographs