Subject to: Robert Bixby

Dr. Robert Bixby has a BS in IEOR from U.C. Berkeley (1968), and a PhD in OR from Cornell (1972). He has held academic positions at the University of Kentucky, Northwestern University, and Rice University. He is currently Noah Harding Professor Emeritus at Rice University and visiting Professor of Mathematics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He co-founded CPLEX Optimization in 1987, and co-founded Gurobi Optimization in 2008, serving as CEO from 2008-2015. Dr. Bixby has published over fifty journal articles and is an acknowledged expert on the computational aspects of linear and integer programming. He has won the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society, and the INFORMS Impact and Frederick W. Lanchester Prizes. He was Editor-in-Chief Mathematical Programming, Series A, 1989-1994, and Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society, 2001-2004. In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Contents of the video:
0:00 – Intro
1:45 – Family background and early years
7:38 – Interest in sports
9:42 – Music
12:12 – High school and college performance
16:49 – Motivation for choosing an engineering program and for studying OR
18:25 – Very impactful course on Real Analysis
20:19 – Getting married in 1966
21:35 – Reaction to civil rights and hippie movements
24:02 – Choosing Cornell over Stanford for graduate school
25:39 – PhD on clutters and matroids
27:12 – Ray Fulkerson stories
33:39 – Meeting legends from the field during the 70s
34:33 – Attending lectures by Jack Edmonds and W. T. Tutte at Cornell
37:09 – László Lovász stories
39:52 – Finding a position at the University of Kentucky in 1972
42:26 – The impact of Tutte’s work on code breaking
46:23 – Proving an important theorem on matroids theory and showing the result to Tutte
50:48 – Anecdotes from a Geometry Conference involving Paul Erdős, László Lovász and others
53:37 – Motivation to leave Kentucky University and join Northwestern University in 1977
55:24 – Working on computational linear programming and interacting with Bob Fourer
57:03- Two non-native speakers who master the English language
59:44 – Moving to Rice University in 1983 and a taking a sabbatical in Germany
1:00:52 – Jack Edmonds anecdote
1:13:10 – Learning German in 1 year
1:05:00 – Learning how to code for real and writing a rudimentary linear programming code in Fortran
1:07:10 – Contributing to the development of LP solvers as a hobby and the influence of Tom Baker
1:14:07 – Co-founding CPLEX Optimization
1:17:43 – On being discouraged by a distinguished OR figure to delve into LP
1:18:49 – Having a lot of fun in the 90s
1:19:09 – Addressing degeneracy on LPs
1:23:01 – Implementing an efficient dual-simplex algorithm with steepest edge
1:27:18 – Entering the airline industry thanks to an efficient interior-point code written by Ed Rothberg
1:30:50 – CPLEX 6.5 breakthrough on solving MIPs
1:37:01 – Dynamic search
1:38:07 – Callable library
1:40:12 – Reason for selling CPLEX to ILOG
1:42:19 – Exciting story from the DIMACS meeting in 1999
1:46:53 – Retiring from Rice University in 2000
1:48:38 – Concorde TSP solver + anecdotes involving Bill Cook and David Applegate
1:56:52 – Leaving ILOG and co-founding Gurobi Optimization
1:59:42 – Competing against CPLEX
2:00:48 – Commercial limitation of BCP, stochastic programming and robust optimization frameworks
2:03:52 – Are recent ideas from academia being used to improve the performance of Gurobi?
2:05:51 – The Analytics movement, AI and mathematical optimization
2:10:32 – No major regrets
2:11:20 – Plans for the future
2:11:54 – Concluding remarks