Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text "Convex Analysis" (1970), which has been cited more than 27,000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
R. Tyrrell ("Terry") Rockafellar in 1977
Roger Jean-Baptiste Robert Wets is a "pioneer" in stochastic programming and a leader in variational analysis who publishes as Roger J-B Wets. His research, expositions, graduate students, and his collaboration with R. Tyrrell Rockafellar have had a profound influence on optimization theory, computations, and applications. Since 2009, Wets has been a distinguished research professor at the mathematicsĀ department of the University of California, Davis.
Wets helped to lead a project on decision-making under uncertainty at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (pictured).
Since 1965 R. Tyrrell Rockafellar (pictured) and Wets have collaborated in stochastic programming, earning the Dantzig prize for their progressive-hedging algorithm and theory of epigraphic convergence.