Written by a world leader in the field and aimed at researchers in applied and engineering sciences, this brilliant text has as its main goal imparting an understanding of the methods so that practitioners can make immediate use of existing algorithms and software, and so that researchers can extend the state of the art and find new applications. It includes algorithms on seeking feasibility and analyzing infeasibility, as well as describing new and surprising applications.

Computational Methods in Optimization

The new edition of this book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date description of the most effective methods in continuous optimization. It responds to the growing interest in optimization in engineering, science, and business by focusing on methods best suited to practical problems. This edition has been thoroughly updated throughout. There are new chapters on nonlinear interior methods and derivative-free methods for optimization, both of which are widely used in practice and are the focus of much current research. Because of the emphasis on practical methods, as well as the extensive illustrations and exercises, the book is accessible to a wide audience.

This book has become the standard for a complete, state-of-the-art description of the methods for unconstrained optimization and systems of nonlinear equations. Originally published in 1983, it provides information needed to understand both the theory and the practice of these methods and provides pseudocode for the problems. The algorithms covered are all based on Newton's method or "quasi-Newton" methods, and the heart of the book is the material on computational methods for multidimensional unconstrained optimization and nonlinear equation problems. The republication of this book by SIAM is driven by a continuing demand for specific and sound advice on how to solve real problems. The level of presentation is consistent throughout, with a good mix of examples and theory, making it a valuable text at both the graduate and undergraduate level. It has been praised as excellent for courses with approximately the same name as the book title and would also be useful as a supplemental text for a nonlinear programming or a numerical analysis course. Many exercises are provided to illustrate and develop the ideas in the text. A large appendix provides a mechanism for class projects and a reference for readers who want the details of the algorithms. Practitioners may use this book for self-study and reference. For complete understanding, readers should have a background in calculus and linear algebra. The book does contain background material in multivariable calculus and numerical linear algebra.

Optimization problems abound in most fields of science, engineering, and tech nology. In many of these problems it is necessary to compute the global optimum (or a good approximation) of a multivariable function. The variables that define the function to be optimized can be continuous and/or discrete and, in addition, many times satisfy certain constraints. Global optimization problems belong to the complexity class of NP-hard prob lems. Such problems are very difficult to solve. Traditional descent optimization algorithms based on local information are not adequate for solving these problems. In most cases of practical interest the number of local optima increases, on the aver age, exponentially with the size of the problem (number of variables). Furthermore, most of the traditional approaches fail to escape from a local optimum in order to continue the search for the global solution. Global optimization has received a lot of attention in the past ten years, due to the success of new algorithms for solving large classes of problems from diverse areas such as engineering design and control, computational chemistry and biology, structural optimization, computer science, operations research, and economics. This book contains refereed invited papers presented at the conference on "State of the Art in Global Optimization: Computational Methods and Applications" held at Princeton University, April 28-30, 1995. The conference presented current re search on global optimization and related applications in science and engineering. The papers included in this book cover a wide spectrum of approaches for solving global optimization problems and applications.

Computationally-intensive tools play an increasingly important role in financial decisions. Many financial problems—ranging from asset allocation to risk management and from option pricing to model calibration—can be efficiently handled using modern computational techniques. Numerical Methods and Optimization in Finance presents such computational techniques, with an emphasis on simulation and optimization, particularly so-called heuristics. This book treats quantitative analysis as an essentially computational discipline in which applications are put into software form and tested empirically. This revised edition includes two new chapters, a self-contained tutorial on implementing and using heuristics, and an explanation of software used for testing portfolio-selection models. Postgraduate students, researchers in programs on quantitative and computational finance, and practitioners in banks and other financial companies can benefit from this second edition of Numerical Methods and Optimization in Finance. Introduces numerical methods to readers with economics backgrounds Emphasizes core simulation and optimization problems Includes MATLAB and R code for all applications, with sample code in the text and freely available for download

Provides a basic understanding of both the underlying mathematics and the computational methods used to solve inverse problems.