Past Awards
The 1997 Lanchester Prize is awarded to R. Tyrrell Rockafellar and Roger J-B Wets for their book Variational Analysis (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1998; published November 1997).
The Committee regards the contribution of this publication as twofold. First, it presents a systematic exposition and a unified treatment of subjects that previously were available only in widely scattered sources that used incompatible terminology. The book succeeds in pulling together these scattered results to create a unified and elegant whole, presented in a way that makes it accessible to a very broad audience. The result is a comprehensive presentation of modern methods for treating variational problems where differentiability is not present, motivated by and having numerous applications in operations research and management sciences, economics, engineering, and social sciences.
Equally important is its presentation of new ideas and new research results. The book provides advances in practically all the basic topics of modern optimization theory, including the technical tools needed to treat such problems as stability, sensitivity analysis, optimality conditions, and duality, bringing the reader up to the most recent achievements. In all, this book should serve as a landmark in the technical progress of optimization, an essential technical tool of operations research and the management sciences.