In 1961, C. Zener, then Director of Science at Westinghouse Corpora tion, and a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences who has made important contributions to physics and engineering, published a short article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled" A Mathe matical Aid in Optimizing Engineering Design. " In this article Zener considered the problem of finding an optimal engineering design that can often be expressed as the problem of minimizing a numerical cost function, termed a "generalized polynomial," consisting of a sum of terms, where each term is a product of a positive constant and the design variables, raised to arbitrary powers. He observed that if the number of terms exceeds the number of variables by one, the optimal values of the design variables can be easily found by solving a set of linear equations. Furthermore, certain invariances of the relative contribution of each term to the total cost can be deduced. The mathematical intricacies in Zener's method soon raised the curiosity of R. J. Duffin, the distinguished mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University who joined forces with Zener in laying the rigorous mathematical foundations of optimizing generalized polynomials. Interes tingly, the investigation of optimality conditions and properties of the optimal solutions in such problems were carried out by Duffin and Zener with the aid of inequalities, rather than the more common approach of the Kuhn-Tucker theory.
This overview provides a single-volume treatment of key algorithms and theories. Begins with the derivation of optimality conditions and discussions of convex programming, duality, generalized convexity, and analysis of selected nonlinear programs, and then explores techniques for numerical solutions and unconstrained optimization methods. 1976 edition. Includes 58 figures and 7 tables.
In 1961, C. Zener, then Director of Science at Westinghouse Corpora tion, and a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences who has made important contributions to physics and engineering, published a short article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled" A Mathe matical Aid in Optimizing Engineering Design. " In this article Zener considered the problem of finding an optimal engineering design that can often be expressed as the problem of minimizing a numerical cost function, termed a "generalized polynomial," consisting of a sum of terms, where each term is a product of a positive constant and the design variables, raised to arbitrary powers. He observed that if the number of terms exceeds the number of variables by one, the optimal values of the design variables can be easily found by solving a set of linear equations. Furthermore, certain invariances of the relative contribution of each term to the total cost can be deduced. The mathematical intricacies in Zener's method soon raised the curiosity of R. J. Duffin, the distinguished mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University who joined forces with Zener in laying the rigorous mathematical foundations of optimizing generalized polynomials. Interes tingly, the investigation of optimality conditions and properties of the optimal solutions in such problems were carried out by Duffin and Zener with the aid of inequalities, rather than the more common approach of the Kuhn-Tucker theory.
Concavity plays a central role in mathematical economics, engineering, management science, and optimization theory. The reason is that concavity of functions is used as a hypothesis in most of the important theorems concerning extremum problems. In other words, concavity is usually a sufficient condition for satisfying the underlying assumptions of these theorems, but concavity is definitely not a necessary condition. In fact, there are large families of functions that are nonconcave and yet have properties similar to those of concave functions. Such functions are called generalized concave functions, and this book is about the various generalizations of concavity, mainly in the context of economics and optimization. Although hundreds of articles dealing with generalized concavity have appeared in scientific journals, numerous textbooks have specific chapters on this subject, and scientific meetings devoted to generalized concavity have been held and their proceedings published, this book is the first attempt to present generalized concavity in a unified framework. We have collected results dealing with this subject mainly from the economics and optimization literature, and we hope that the material presented here will be useful in applications and will stimulate further research. The writing of this book constituted a unique experience for the authors in international scientific cooperation-cooperation that extended over many years and at times spanned three continents. It was an extremely fruitful and enjoyable experience, which we will never forget.
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