Bio

Dimitri P. 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 Ph.D. in system science in 1971 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. 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 at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), where he is currently McAfee Professor of Engineering. In 2019, he was also appointed a full time professor at the department of Computer, Information, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University, Tempe, while maintaining a research position at MIT. His research 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 seventeen books and research monographs, several of which are used as textbooks in MIT classes.

Professor 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”, 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 2018, he was awarded, jointly with his coauthor John Tsitsiklis, the INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize, for the contributions of the research monographs “Parallel and Distributed Computation” and “Neuro-Dynamic Programming”. 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.”

Dr. Bertsekas’ recent books are “Introduction to Probability: 2nd Edition” (2008), “Convex Optimization Theory” (2009), “Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control,” Vol. I, (2017), and Vol. II: (2012), “Abstract Dynamic Programming” (2018), “Convex Optimization Algorithms” (2015), and “Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control” (2019), all published by Athena Scientific.

Besides his professional activities, Professor Bertsekas is interested in travel and nature photography. His pictures have been exhibited on several occasions at M.I.T., and can also be accessed from his personal website.

Papers and Reports

Complete List of Publications, Research Papers, Wikipedia

Textbooks

Professor Bertsekas is the author of

and co-author of

Research

Professor Bertsekas has done research in the areas of

  • linear and nonlinear programming
  • network optimization
  • dynamic and neuro-dynamic programming
  • estimation and control of stochastic systems
  • neural networks
  • parallel and distributed computation
  • data communication networks

and has written numerous research papers in each of these areas.