Dimitri Bertsekas

McAfee Professor (Post-Tenure), Electrical Engineering

Dimitri Bertsekas’ undergraduate studies were in engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He obtained his MS in electrical engineering at the George Washington University, Wash. DC in 1969, and his PhD in system science in 1971 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Prof. Bertsekas has held faculty positions with the Engineering-Economic Systems Dept., Stanford University (1971-1974) and the Electrical Engineering Dept. of the University of Illinois, Urbana (1974-1979). Since 1979 he has been teaching at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT where he is currently McAfee Professor of Engineering. He has held editorial positions in several journals. His research at MIT spans several fields, including optimization, control, large-scale computation, and data communication networks, and is closely tied to his teaching and book authoring activities. He has written numerous research papers, and sixteen books, several of which are used as textbooks in MIT classes.

Prof. 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 Tsitsiklis), the 2000 Greek National Award for Operations Research, the 2001 ACC John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the 2014 ACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for “contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control,” the 2014 Khachiyan Prize for Life-Time Accomplishments in Optimization, and the SIAM/MOS 2015 George B. Dantzig Prize. In 2001 he was elected to the United States 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.”

Prof. Bertsekas’ recent books are Introduction to Probability: 2nd Edition (2008), Convex Optimization Theory (2009), Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control, Vol. II: Approximate Dynamic Programming (2012), Abstract Dynamic Programming (2013), and Convex Optimization Algorithms (2015), all published by Athena Scientific.


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