UNSW mathematicians win Marguerite Frank award for best EJCO paper 2024
Professor Jeya Jeyakumar, Professor Guoyin Li, and PhD candidate, Yingkun (Queenie) Huang win Marguerite Frank award.
Published on the 18 March 2025
L-R Professor Jeya Jeyakumar, PhD candidate Queenie Huang, and Professor Guoyin
The UNSW School of Mathematics and Statistics is pleased to announce that the 2024 Marguerite Frank Award for Best Paper of the Euro Journal on Computational Optimization (EJCO, Q1-tier journal) has been awarded to three UNSW mathematicians, Professor Jeya Jeyakumar, opens in a new window, Professor Guoyin Li, and PhD candidate, Yingkun (Queenie) Huang, opens in a new window.
The awarded paper, Piecewise SOS-convex moment optimization and applications via exact semi-definite programs, opens in a new window, examines exact Semi-Definite Program (SDP) reformulations for infinite-dimensional moment optimization problems involving a new class of piecewise Sum-of-Squares (SOS)-convex functions and projected spectrahedral support sets.
"It is a great honour to receive the prestigious Marguerite Frank Award,” says Professor Jeyakumar, “especially in collaboration with our PhD student, Queenie Huang. This recognition will undoubtedly serve as an important milestone in Queenie’s academic journey, helping her further excel in her research and establish herself as an outstanding scholar.”
The annually awarded prize was created in recognition of the life-long achievement in optimization (and Lie algebras) by Marguerite (Straus) Frank, opens in a new window, who sadly died at the age of 97 in her home of Palo Alto, California on 11 December 2024. A brilliant mathematician, Marguerite is recognised for many achievements including her work with Philip Wolfe (Princeton University) that resulted in the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, an iterative first-order optimization algorithm for constrained convex optimization, in 1956.
Professor Jeyakumar, Professor Li, and PhD candidate Huang will receive their award at a special invited session at the 34th European Conference on Operational Research in June as part of EURO 2025 at the University of Leeds, opens in a new window, during which they have been invited to present their findings.