Roger J-B Wets

His research, expositions, graduate students, and his collaboration with R. Tyrrell Rockafellar have had a profound influence on optimization theory, computations, and applications.

[7] He was encouraged by Jacques H. Drèze to study optimization with George Dantzig at the program in operations research at the University of California, Berkeley.

[5] While at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, during 1980–1984,[5] he led research in decision-making in uncertainty, returning as an acting leader in 1985–1987; during that time, Wets and Rockafellar developed the progressive-hedging algorithm for stochastic programming.

[11] Wets and his coauthor R. Tyrrell Rockafellar were awarded the 1997 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for their monograph Variational Analysis, which was published in November 1997 and copyrighted in 1998.

Besides his theoretical and computational contributions, Wets has worked with applications on lake ecology (IIASA), finance (Frank Russel investment system), and developmental economics (World Bank).

Wets helped to lead a project on decision-making under uncertainty at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (pictured) .
Since 1965 R. Tyrrell Rockafellar (pictured) and Wets have collaborated in stochastic programming, earning the Dantzig prize for their progressive-hedging algorithm and theory of epigraphic convergence.