Robert E. Bixby is an American mathematician, the Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University.
Bixby received a Bachelor of Science with a major in industrial engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (1968) and a Doctor of Philosophy in operations research from Cornell University (1972).
His doctoral students have included Collette Coullard at Northwestern University, and Eva K. Lee at Rice.
Bixby was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for contributions to combinatorial optimization and the development and commercialization of high-performance optimization software.
[4][5][6] He is also a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.