Richard Alfred Tapia

Dr. Richard A. Tapia is the Director of Center for Excellence and Equity in Education, University Professor, and Maxfield- Oshman Professor in Engineering at Rice University. He is a contributor to mathematical optimization and pioneered the exploration and settlement of several of the important issues surrounding interior-point methods. His research demonstrated that it was possible to design a new interior-point method that possessed both the properties of optimal computational complexity and optimal convergence rate. He showed that the efficiency of the interior-point methods is explained by their connection to Newton's method, enabling him to prove the super-linear convergence of several classes of interior-point methods. He had a key role in establishing that the success of interior-point methods is due not only to their polynomial computational complexity, but also to their super-linear convergence, a property that enables interior-point methods to find highly accurate solutions of optimization problems in the finite precision arithmetic used by digital computers. He is known for mentoring of science and engineering undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups. The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing and The David Blackwell-Richard Tapia Mathematics Conference are named in honor of his mentoring and outreach contributions.