Margaret Wright, Bell Laboratories
What, if anything, is new in optimization?
Many ideas of recent interest in continuous optimization have been around for a long time: Newton's method, barrier methods, and direct search methods, to name only a few. It has been argued that there is nothing new in the field, and that today's research is simply a rearrangement of old ideas. We shall analyze three major themes in optimization in terms of novelty and other germane properties.