Professor John E. Dennis Jr was the 2006 AMSI/ANZIAM lecturer.
He is a Research Professor and Noah Harding Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA.
Professor Dennis’s expertise is optimisation algorithms for industrial and computational mathematics, in which he has a long-standing collaboration with Boeing. His work is rated ‘highly cited’ in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) index.
AMSI sponsored his visit to Australia in February. At the annual conference of ANZIAM at Mansfield, Victoria, he spoke on Optimal Placement of Tsunami Warning Buoys and was an active participant in discussions on optimisation. He then spoke at nine member universities across Australia. As well as repeating the talk on tsunami buoys, he also presented talks on Optimisation using Surrogates for Engineering Design and Mesh Adaptive Direct Search Algorithms.
