William Cook

William Cook is a University Professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on combinatorial optimization, computational discrete optimization, and the traveling salesman problem (TSP). He is renowned for co-developing the Concorde TSP Solver, a leading software for solving TSP instances. Cook has held editorial roles in top journals such as Mathematical Programming Computation and Mathematical Programming, and served as Chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society and Vice Chair of INFORMS Computing Society.

His research interests include algorithm design, operations research, graph theory, and computational methods for NP-hard problems. Notable contributions include advancing cutting-plane methods, branch-and-bound algorithms, and hybrid optimization techniques. Cook has authored influential books like In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman and The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study.

Awards include membership in the National Academy of Engineering, SIAM Fellowship, INFORMS Fellowship, and the $100,000 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge prize (2021). He has advised numerous projects in computational optimization, including studies on deep learning applications and combinatorial algorithm development. His work bridges theoretical advancements with practical software tools like QSopt and QSopt_ex.