William John Cook is an American operations researcher and mathematician, professor in Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo since January 2013, after being for 10 years the Chandler Family Chair Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Education
After earning a master"s degree in operations research from Stanford University in 1980, he moved to the University of Waterloo, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in combinatorics and optimization in 1983 under the supervision of United States R. Murty.
Career
He is known for his work on the traveling salesman problem and is one of the authors of the Concorde TSP Solver. Cook did his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, graduating in 1979 with a bachelor"s degree in mathematics. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Bonn, he joined the Cornell University faculty in 1985, moved to Columbia University in 1987, and in 1988 joined the research staff of Bell Communications Research.
In 1994 he returned to academia as John von Neumann Professor at the University of Bonn, and in 1996 he moved to Rice University as Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics.
In 2002 he took his position at Georgia Technology He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Mathematical Programming Computation (since 2008), and the former editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming (Series B from 1993 to 2003, and Series A from 2003 to 2007).
Membership
American Mathematical Society.