Michel Goemans

Bio

Michel Goemans joined the MIT math faculty in 1992, and was appointed Professor of Mathematics in 2002. He was the initial holder of the Leighton Family Professorship, and now holds the RSA Professorship since 2021. He became Department Head of the Mathematics Department in 2018, following a year as Interim Head. He is also a member of the Theory of Computation Group at MIT-CSAIL.

He received both the B.S. & M.S. degrees in applied mathematics from UCLouvain in 1987, and completed the Ph.D. at MIT in 1990. Goemans continued at MIT as C.L.E. Moore Instructor of applied mathematics from 1990 to 1992.

Goemans' research interests include combinatorial optimization, combinatorics and algorithms, in particular developing new techniques for designing approximation algorithms. His celebrated result for the maximum cut problem based on the novel technique of semidefinite optimization has been shown to be best possible. His research contributions have been rewarded with a number of awards, including the A.W. Tucker Prize (1991), the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Prize (1996 & 1999), the AMS Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize (2000), the Farkas Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society, and most recently, the George B. Dantzig Prize from SIAM and MOS (2021), and the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the AMS for Seminal Contributions to Research (2022). At MIT, he received the MIT School of Science Student Advising Award (2004) and the Dean's Recognition Unsung Hero award (2006).

Goemans is a Sloan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2016, he received a Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from UCLouvain, Belgium.