Jorge Nocedal
Jorge Nocedal (born 1952) is an applied mathematician, computer scientist and the Walter P. Murphy professor at Northwestern University who in 2017 received the John Von Neumann Theory Prize. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020. Nocedal specializes in nonlinear optimization, both in the deterministic and stochastic setting. The motivation for his current algorithmic and theoretical research stems from applications in image and speech recognition, recommendation systems, and search engines. In the past, he has also worked on equilibrium problems with application in robotics, traffics, and games, optimization applications in finance, as well as PDE-constrained optimization. Biography Nocedal was born and raised in Mexico. He obtained a B.Sc. in physics from the National University of Mexico in 1974. From 1974 to 1978, Nocedal studied at Rice University, where he obtained a PhD in mathematical sciences under the supervision of Richard A. Tapia. Prior to joining Northwestern University in 1983, Nocedal spent three years (1978–1981) as an assistant professor at the National University of Mexico and two years (1981–1983) as a research assistant at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. Nocedal joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at Northwestern University in