1. Tobias Achterberg, ILOG-CPLEX (leading software vendor)

2. Brian Borchers, New Mexico Tech

3. Stephen Boyd, Stanford University

4. Samuel Burer, The University of Iowa

5. William Cook, Georgia Institute of Technology

6. J E Dennis, Rice University

7. Robert Fourer, Northwestern University

8. William Hager, University of Florida

9. Christoph Helmberg, Chemnitz University of Technology

10. Masakazu Kojima, Tokyo Institute of Technology

11. Csaba Meszaros, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

12. Jorge More, Argonne National Laboratory

13. Nikolaos Sahinidis, University of Illiois, Urbana Champaign

14. Andre Tits, University of Maryland

15. Michael Todd, Cornell University

16. Kim-Chuan Toh, National University of Singapore

17. Lieven Vandenberghe, University of California, Los Angeles

18. Henry Wolkowicz, University of Waterloo

19. Yinyu Ye, Stanford University

20. Yin Zhang, Rice University

---------- Forwarded message ----------Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:23:25 -0800From: Stephen Boyd <boyd@stanford.edu>To: dieter@math.la.asu.eduCc: Stephen Boyd <boyd@stanford.edu>Subject: Re: letter of support

Prof. D. ArmbrusterChair, Dept. Math&StatsArizona State UniversityBox 871804Tempe, AZ 85287-1804U.S.A.

Professor Armbruster,

I'm writing to express my strongest support and encouragement, as well asthanks, to Professor Hans Mittelmann for creating and maintaining hisoptimization web sites. I myself use it frequently, and I constantly referothers to it, as the best source --- worldwide --- for finding real benchmarks,carefully carried out, of the most recent codes for semidefinite programmingand other cutting-edge optimization problems. What Professor Mittelmann hasbuilt provides a huge benefit for an entire research community, and perhapsmore important, for others who are new to these ideas. Semidefiniteprogramming has swept several fields in the last decade. Many factorscontributed to this, but it is certain that a substantial role was played byProfessor Mittelmann, through his well maintained websites.

The websites are also useful to those just starting out research, or completelynew to optimization. I routinely point students to his websites to get a quickand very good "lay of the land" in optimization. I find it to be a superbcomplement to survey books that list the main 30 algorithms and methods; thewebsite, in contrast, is a "live" object, with active links to codes, examples,and other useful information.

Sadly, contributions like this often go unrewarded or at least under rewarded(for example, by NSF or other conventional research funding agencies, who arealways looking for the next research fad). But these contributions have verylarge impact on the research community, and I think should be stronglysupported, in any way, and whenever possible. It's tough because thesecontributions often do not show up, or show up only weakly, in conventionalmeasures of scholarly output such as publication count, citation index counts,etc.

I hope my huge enthusiasm, respect, and gratitude, for what ProfessorMittelmann has done is clear.

If there's anything else I can help with, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Stephen BoydSamsung Chair in EngineeringProfessor of Electrical EngineeringStanford University

www.stanford.edu/~boyd/

McCormick Robert R. McCormick Department of School of Engineering and Industrial Engineering Applied Science and Management Sciences Northwestern University Robert Fourer, Professor 2145 Sheridan Road, Room C234 4er@iems.northwestern.edu Evanston, IL 60208-3119 847-491-3151, fax 847-467-1828

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January 17, 2006

Prof. D. Armbruster Chair, Department of Mathematics and Statistics Arizona State University Box 871804 Tempe, AZ 85287-1804

I am pleased to be able to confirm the considerable contributions that Hans Mittelmann has been making to progress in large-scale optimization and to the activities of the optimization community. His work can be viewed as having three major components, all of them quite significant.

First, he has made a sizable number of optimization “solvers” — 17 in all — available for research and teaching throughout the world via the NEOS Server (www-neos.mcs.anl.gov). Many of these apply to problem types and algorithmic methods that are not widely appreciated. Putting each solver onto NEOS requires a substantial amount of one-time work, after which others can use the solver with no more difficulty than if they had installed it locally.

Second, he has developed the Decision Tree for Optimization Software web site (plato.la.asu.edu/guide.html) which provides a listing of optimization software systematically arranged by problem type. This addresses one of the most common difficulties faced by people attempting to use optimization methods: mathematically categorizing their problem to determine which optimization packages are appropriate for it. In its scope and thoroughness, this site is unlike any other currently available.

Third, he has maintained a web site of benchmarks of optimization software of various kinds (plato.la.asu.edu/bench.html). This site offers a snapshot of current progress in optimization software, and has provided motivation for improvements in a number of areas. This activity involves a considerable amount of effort in getting solvers

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installed on the benchmarking platform, collecting test problems, and accumulating results of all the runs. Besides giving results of tests that Prof. Mittelmann has run, this site provides a valuable collection of links to other sites and papers that offer benchmark information. No other site has provided a comparably thorough service in the optimization area.

This work has proved valuable to teachers, researchers, and practitioners who apply optimization in such varied areas as production planning, financial analysis, and semiconductor design. Prof. Mittelmann has performed this work, moreover, without monetary or personnel support, and in fact the authority and independence of the decision-tree and benchmark web sites rely on his independence from particular optimization software developers or users. As a result, this work may be hard to evaluate, particularly on the part of those in other disciplines. Having myself worked in the large-scale optimization field for over 25 years, I can confirm that Prof. Mittelmann’s contributions are widely recognized by his peers for their unique value.

Sincerely,

Robert Fourer

Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences

---------- Forwarded message ----------Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 20:43:39 -0500 (EST)From: William Hager <hager@math.ufl.edu>To: armbruster@asu.eduSubject: Hans Mittelmann

Dear Professor Armbruster:

This letter in reference to Hans Mittelmann's work in connectionwith the Decision Tree for Optimization Software, Benchmarks forOptimization Software, and Web-Submission. Hans has been a leaderin the analysis and development of optimization algorithm. His webpages are one of the best sources for test problems and benchmarksand rigorous information concerning the relative merits of optimizationsoftware and algorithms. Hence, I invited Hans to be on theeditorial board of Computation of Optimization and Applicationswhere we could utilize his expertise when evaluatingcomputational optimization papers for possible publication.Hans' input as the journal has developed has been extremelyvaluable. The journal also established a web page called the"Software Forum" and some of the main links on this web page pointto Hans' web pages. If one uses google to search for ``optimizationsoftware'', then shortly after the two sponsored links by Exceland by ILOG, you will see Hans' web page, higher than companies such asDash or Mosek or Lindo, and Stanford's group. Hans' optimization researchand algorithms and his web interfaces are highly visible, a sourcefor pride at Arizona State University.

Best regards,

William W. HagerEditor-in-Chief Computational Optimization and ApplicationsCo-director, Center for Applied OptimizationProfessor, Department of Mathematics

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:38:22 -0500 (EST)Subject: Appreciation for extraordinary computational optimization supportFrom: "Michael Jeremy Todd" <mjt7@cornell.edu>To: mittelmann@asu.eduCc: "Michael Todd" <mjt7@cornell.edu>User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.8MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitX-Priority: 3 (Normal)Importance: NormalX-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-newStatus: R

Dear Hans,

This letter is to thank you for your outstanding contributions to thecomputational optimization community by providing information onsoftware products for various optimization problems, and especiallyfor your work on independently benchmarking various codes on a widevariety of application-oriented test problems, and your work onpreparing solvers to be used on the Network Enabled OptimizationServer.

These contributions have helped markedly improve the quality of researchcodes for many classes of optimization problems (it has certainlyspurred the development of our code SDPT3), and made them widelyavailable to scientists and engineers in a consistent and user-friendlyenvironment.

Thus your work has helped to improve a great number of codes, and alsohelped many many scientists and engineers get better and faster solutionsto their problems.

Much of this worked cannot be published in usual outlets, but it is muchappreciated by the optimization community, which owes you considerablegratitude.

With best wishes for the holiday and the New Year,

Sincerely,

Mike ToddLeon C. Welch Professor of Engineering,School of Operations Research and Information Engineering,Cornell University,Ithaca, NY 14853.

Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 18:14:52 +0800From: Toh Kim Chuan <mattohkc@nus.edu.sg>To: armbruster@asu.eduCc: Toh Kim Chuan <mattohkc@nus.edu.sg>Subject: letter of support for Hans Mittelmann

Dear Professor Armbruster

I am writing this letter to testify Hans Mittelmann's contributionsto the optimization community.

My research is on the design and implementation ofalgorithms for semidefinite programming (SDP).The latter is a current hot topic in the optimization community.I have written a software package for SDP, called SDPT3.There are at least 5 other SDP software packages.

Hans provided valuable services to the SDP software developersby conducting extensive testing and benchmark for allthe SDP software. As an independent evaluator, hehad helped to spur a healthy competition among theSDP software developers, and accelerated theresearch progress in SDP solvers. More importantly, his benchmarkhelped to probe the weakness of the software packages, andthus alerted the developers on the aspectsneeded improvement to make their software morerobust and user friendly.

He also provided another valuable service to the communityby collecting and generating a large number of SDP test problems.This is akin to the NETLIB test problems for Linear Programming,but more extensive and labour intensive. I routinely use his collectionof test problems to test my software whenever I upgrade it.

I truly appreciate his contributions to theSDP software development in the community.

Sincerely,Kim-Chuan TOH

Department of MathematicsNational University of Singapore

University of Waterloo

Faculty of MathematicsDepartment of Combinatorics and OptimizationWaterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1phone: 519­888­4567 x5589FAX: 519­725­5441URL: orion.math.uwaterloo.ca/˜hwolkowi

Professor Henry WolkowiczEmail: hwolkowicz@uwaterloo.ca

November 22, 2006

Prof. D. ArmbrusterChair, Dept. Math&StatsArizona State UniversityBox 871804Tempe, AZ 85287-1804U.S.A.

Dear Professor Armbruster,

This letter acknowledges Professor Hans Mittlemann’s important contributions to research throughhis webpages. This includes the Decision Tree for Optimization Software at http://plato.asu.edu/guide.html,and, in particular, the Benchmarks at http://plato.asu.edu/sub/benchm.html. I have used thesewebpages for many years. For researchers in optimization, it is important to be able to compareresults among various software packages and to have benchmarks for ones own research. Thesewebpages have been indispensible for researchers in optimization.

Yours Sincerely,

Professor Henry Wolkowicz