Donald Goldfarb

Donald Goldfarb is an American mathematician known for his work in mathematical optimization and numerical analysis. Born in New York City in 1941, he studied chemical engineering at Cornell University, took a master's degree at Princeton University in 1965 and earned his doctorate in 1966 with a thesis on a conjugate gradient method for nonlinear programming. After two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Courant Institute he co-founded the computer science department of the City College of New York, where he served on the faculty for fourteen years, and in 1982 he joined the industrial engineering and operations research department at Columbia University, which he chaired from 1984 to 2002 and left on retirement in 2024. He is one of the developers of the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno algorithm, the quasi-Newton method known as BFGS, and with J. J. Forrest he developed the steepest edge simplex method in 1992. His honours include the INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize in 2017 and the Khachiyan Prize in 2013, and he has served as editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming.