Hoàng Tụy
Native spelling: Hoàng Tụy
1927–2019, Điện Bàn, Quảng Nam, Vietnam, Hanoi, Vietnam
Vietnamese mathematician considered the founding father of deterministic global optimization: his 1964 paper on concave minimization under linear constraints introduced 'Tuy's cut' and launched modern nonconvex global optimization.
Hoàng Tụy was born in Điện Bàn, Quảng Nam, into a prominent scholarly family. Largely self-taught in advanced mathematics during the First Indochina War, he went to Moscow in 1957 and earned his doctorate at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1959 with work on real analysis and measure theory before turning to operations research and optimization in response to practical planning problems in Vietnam.
In 1964 he published 'Concave Programming under Linear Constraints' in 'Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR'. Whereas convex optimization stops at local optima, minimizing a concave function over a polytope has many local minima at vertices; Tụy introduced a cutting-plane construction — now called Tuy's cut — that systematically eliminates pieces of the feasible region, a paper universally recognized as the birth of deterministic global optimization. He went on to develop difference-of-convex (DC) programming, monotonic optimization, and branch-and-bound methods, co-authoring the standard reference 'Global Optimization: Deterministic Approaches' with Reiner Horst.
Alongside Lê Văn Thiêm, Hoàng Tụy built the institutions of modern Vietnamese mathematics, chairing the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Hanoi (1961–1968) and directing the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics (1980–1989). He received the Hồ Chí Minh Prize in 1996 and, in 2011, became the inaugural recipient of the Constantin Carathéodory Prize of the International Society of Global Optimization.
Workplaces: University of Hanoi, Vietnam Institute of Mathematics
Vietnam