UCLA Math Professor Ernest Ryu was awarded the 2024 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers. This prestigious award was established in 1998 and is awarded annually at the INFORMS Annual Meeting to young researchers for an outstanding paper in optimization.

Specifically, the award recognizes the paper entitled “Uniqueness of DRS as the 2 operator resolvent-splitting and impossibility of 3 operator resolvent-splitting.” published in the journal Mathematical Programming in 2020. In this work, Ryu solves a forty-year open problem regarding the uniqueness and extendability of Douglas-Rachford splitting (DRS), which is a very influential operator splitting method in optimization. Moreover, the innovative, skillful proof techniques have generated a series of exciting follow-up works from other researchers.

The INFORMS Optimization Section was formed in the fall of 1995 and became a Society in 2004 to promote the development and application of optimization methods and encourage the exchange of information among practitioners and scholars in the optimization area.

Learn more about the award here: https://connect.informs.org/optimizationsociety/prizes/young-researchers-prize