Preface

This volume contains the Proceedings of the First German-Israeli Research Workshop on Optimization, which took place on October 16–19, 2017, at the Center for Mathematical Sciences (CMS) of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. About 50 participants, mainly from Israel and Germany, but also from other countries, met in the heart of the beautiful Carmel Mountain region on the northern Mediterranean coast of Israel. They discussed recent developments in the field of optimization, including numerical optimization, stochastic optimization, optimal control of partial differential equations and variational analysis. Almost 40 lectures were delivered, covering a large part of the theoretical and practical aspects of optimization.

The workshop was held under the auspices of the CMS, and supported by the Mallat Family Fund for Research in Mathematics and by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We are very grateful to these institutions for their generous help.

The growing importance of optimization has been realized in recent years. This is due not only to theoretical developments in this area, but also to numerous applications to engineering and economics. The Technion, which was chosen as the venue for this workshop, is one of the world leading research centers in this area.

The Organizing Committee of the First German-Israeli Research Workshop on Optimization consisted of Simeon Reich, Itai Shafrir, Gershon Wolansky and Alexander Zaslavski, all from the Technion, on the Israeli side, and Diethard Pallaschke (Karlsruhe), Vladimir Shikhman (Chemnitz) and Oliver Stein (Karlsruhe) on the German side.

We take this opportunity to express our gratitude to all the workshop participants and to all the authors for attending the workshop and for contributing to its proceedings. Special thanks are due to Maya Shpigelman and to all those involved in the organization of this workshop for their excellent work. We are also very grateful to Elisabeth Köbis from the University of Halle for her kind and meticulous help with our editorial work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.