This is the scene that will be burned into my mind forever. Brunson walking the Canyon of Heroes, fans all around him, the trophy. Superhero shit. The King of New York
Today is for everybody who remembers this inexplicable Doug E. Fresh cover of “Country Roads” that subbed in “New York City” for “West Virginia” and played at least once during every Knicks game from 2004 to 2008
Maybe I am simplifying a bit, but in the 1990s onwards numerical optimization was not considered an exciting area. There were many breakthroughs (say, Karmarkar, and in hindsight esp. Nesterov/Nemirovski) but not much funding. Junior faculty in the area were denied tenure. The problems and the algorithms seemed to suffice. Convex problems, tens of thousands of variables. Who needs more?
So let’s spend a minute in silence contemplating the ONE TRILLION spend (this year) devoted to efficiently solving a distributed, non-convex numerical optimization problem in ~1E12 variables. Did we ever get to spend that much in simulations and PDEs for nuclear devices? Not even close; less than $10B/yr. What about NOAA (weather prediction) ? Also lss than $10B/yr.
So this is the biggest ever application of numerical methods ever, by a mile. Also, the most consequential optimization problem, ever.
Many departments withering, or closing. It turns out we were just not looking far enough. I guess there is a lesson about research in this.
@ZackBlatt Hope he fairs well here. Think Noe Ruelas, Kicker out of UCF (currently at Colts minicamp) is the best kicker coming out of this collegiate class. Wish we signed him