Robert J. Vanderbei (born 1955) is an American mathematician and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University.
He received his BS in Chemistry in 1976 and an MS in Operations Research and Statistics in 1978 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1981.
In 1984, he left academia and joined Bell Labs, where he served as a team member of AT&T's Advanced Decision Support Systems venture.
In May 1985, he became the first nonmanagement team member of AT&T's Advanced Decision Support Systems venture, where he served as the interface to Karmarkar and as the lead developer of the first release of the linear programming software.
Dikin, working in Siberia and publishing in Russian, had proved convergence of the same algorithm under weaker nondegeneracy assumptions many years earlier.
In 1987, Vanderbei left the development team and moved to the Bell Labs' Math Research Center in Murray Hill, NJ.
[12] In 2012 he became a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for "contributions to technologies for exoplanet searches and to interior-point methods for nonlinear optimization".