Samuel Burer, a Math graduate student in the ACO program is a coauthor on a paper picked for "Hot Paper" for September 2003, on the ISI Essential Science Indicators web page.
Samuel Burer is now an Assistant Professor of Managment Science at the University of Iowa.
The paper cited is titled, "Solving a class of semidefinite programs via nonlinear programming",
and is coauthored with Professor Renato D.C. Monteiro, of ISYE at Georgia Tech, and
Professor Yin Zhang of Computational and Applied Mathematicsat Rice University.
The paper demonstrates that a class of semidefinite programs can be solved by nonlinear
programming techniques, in a manner that is simpler and more efficient than interior point methods.