Book recommendation: Street-Fighting Mathematics by Sanjoy Mahajan
I read this early in my PhD, and it's been with me ever since. Chapter 1 grants a superpower that I cannot imagine living without.
📢 #ISMP2027 comes to Amsterdam!
The 26th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming will be held July 25–30, 2027.
Join researchers from around the world to discuss advances, challenges, and opportunities in the theory and practice of mathematical optimization.
🔗 ismp2027.mathopt.nl
#MOS
📢 New member benefit! 🎁 Free e-book 📘
EMS members can now enjoy access to "Writing Mathematical Papers in English – a practical guide" by Jerzy Trzeciak in their member profile area.
Not a member yet? Join the EMS and enjoy all benefits:
euromathsoc.org/individual-m...
2026 Mixed Integer Programming Workshop* (MIP 2026), May 18-21, 2026, University of Connecticut, Stamford campus. Poster abstract submission deadline is February 20, 2026.
www.mixedinteger.org/2026/posters
The SCIP 10 optimization suite has many new interesting features and is fully open source. For binaries and downloads, check www.scipopt.org/index.php#do...
Not exactly the same context, but it makes me think of this
www.youtube.com/watch?v=w82a...
I see. Thank you!
Is there a rule of thumb for how to split research content between a conference paper and its extended journal version, while respecting overlap limits and without it looking like holding back material?
The 2026 Land-Doig Competition is open! This year’s topic is GPU-Accelerated Primal Heuristics for Mixed-Integer Programming. Details below.
www.mixedinteger.org/2026/competi...
... even though it allows for more fine-grained control and a deeper understanding of MIP aspects, rather than relying on a black-box solver where many things may happen under the hood? This seems to be a trend noticed among students in e.g. previous MIP workshops.
This is great. Thanks for putting this together, Thiago!
If I may ask, is there a particular reason for using a (interface to a) commercial solver rather than an academic or open-source one, such as SCIP? I’m generally curious why it seems to be less commonly used, at least in US institutions ...
Krunal explores different optimization strategies for this year’s IMO P6, a combinatorial tiling problem with tricky coverage constraints.
Worth a look!
Multiple AI systems won gold medals at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Exciting as that sounds,
@GregHBurnham
argues that it represents little progress: an unlucky draw of problems made the event relatively uninformative.
Is that cope? Judge for yourself. 🧵
This is about one of my greatest inspirations. It would mean a lot to me if you gave it a watch
The first author of that paper was his own supervisor, Ailsa Land, who was still at the London School of Economics. But he did not know what had become of the second author. “All I know is that she was Australian and that she shares your name,” Gilbert said to me. Many years later, I started teaching optimisation (and her own branch-and-bound method) at the University of Melbourne. I always mentioned the mystery of this Australian woman who was my namesake and who had disappeared after publishing such an influential paper. After one of these classes, a student approached me and said, “Professor, there’s a tutor here named Alison. Maybe it’s her.” With little hope, I looked into it, and to my surprise, the tutor was indeed Alison Doig, now Alison Harcourt. My desire was to run, knock on each one of my colleagues’ doors and ask: “Do you know who that woman is?”.
This story of the discovery of Alison Doig the person is wild
pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/cel...
Graph theorist Maria Chudnovsky proved the strong perfect graph theorem, which was proposed back in the 1960s. Tune in to “The Joy of Why” with co-host @jannalevinastro.bsky.social:
And a personal thanks to @thserra.bsky.social for his advice and for inspiring me (and hopefully others) to do this and contribute to the community😄
A special issue of the INFORMS Journal on Optimization is soon open for submissions.
And that's a wrap on #EuroMIP25! Three packed days of great talks and inspiring research.
Huge thanks to @sophie.huiberts.me , @matbesancon.bsky.social, the rest of the MIP committee and the local team for making this first edition a real success!
The talk wraps up with future directions, including a Branch-and-Price implementation to handle integrality, and the potential of combining Simplicial and Dantzig-Wolfe decompositions. Lucas also briefly mentions leveraging quantum optimization for tackling QUBO pricing subproblems.
Lucas also draws nice connections to graph theory, where these structural links help identify when and how a problem can be broken down effectively.
Finally, Lucas hints at the promise of block decompositions when the problem allows it. Numerical evidence suggests that when the model breaks into a handful of blocks (typically less than five), block-wise decomposition strategies can be effective.
A key takeaway is that injecting quadratic constraints in the pricing leads to better dual bounds but a harder pricing subproblem (as is the case for general DW in MIP).
The focus then shifts to non-convex binary quadratic problems, with reformulations that blend Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition with convex quadratic reformulations.
