Ralph Baker Kearfott

Professor Emeritus
Applied Mathematics

204G Maxim Doucet Hall
337-482-5270
rbk@louisiana.edu

Baker Kearfott's webpage

Ph.D. 1977 University of Utah
M.S. 1974 University of Utah
B.S. 1972 University of Utah

Prof. Kearfott's research interests are clustered in several areas. These include global optimization, software development and computer arithmetic, interval computations, and modeling associated with operations research problems. Specifically, one aspect of his work focuses on branch and bound algorithms for continuous global optimization, with an emphasis on accounting for roundoff error to obtain mathematically rigorous bounds. This work has grown out of an interest to understand nonlinear systems, including parametrized systems and singularities. In the operations research line, Prof. Kearfott has collaborated with the Center for Business Information Technology and a graduate student to develop a model, specific to Lafayette Parish, for pre-placement of post-emergency relief supplies; that project led the student and Prof. Kearfott to develop an extensive knowledge of transportation and facility location models.

Prof. Kearfott has a single-authored monograph, has co-authored two other books, and has edited three collections of work appearing as books. Among many papers, he has published various articles in the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, the SIAM journal on Numerical Analysis, the SIAM journal on Scientific Computing, the Journal of Global Optimization, and Optimization Methods and Software, he is on the editorial board of Optimization Letters, and he is the managing editor of Reliable Computing. He has been active in producing an IEEE standard for interval arithmetic, and he is presently chair of the IEEE Standards Association Microprocessing Standardization Committee.

Selected research publications:

• Karhbet, Sam and Kearfott, Ralph Baker, Range bounds of functions over simplices, for branch and bound algorithms, Reliab. Comput., 25 (2017),53--73.
• Guilbeau, Jared T. and Hossain, Md. Istiaq and Karhbet, Sam D. and Kearfott, Ralph Baker and Sanusi, Temitope S. and Zhao, Lihong, A review of computation of mathematically rigorous bounds on optima of linear programs, J. Global Optim., 68 (2017) no. 3,677--683.
• Kearfott, R. Baker, Preface [Special issue in honor of Ray Moore, 1929--2015], Reliab. Comput., 23 (2016),1.
• Kearfott, Ralph Baker, Some observations on exclusion regions in branch and bound algorithms, J. Global Optim., 62 (2015) no. 2,229--241.
• Kearfott, Ralph Baker, On rigorous upper bounds to a global optimum, J. Global Optim., 59 (2014) no. 2-3,459--476.
• Baker Kearfott, Ralph and Castille, Jessie M. and Tyagi, Gaurav, Assessment of a non-adaptive deterministic global optimization algorithm for problems with low-dimensional non-convex subspaces, Optim. Methods Softw., 29 (2014) no. 2,430--441.
• Kearfott, Ralph Baker and Muniswamy, Sowmya and Wang, Yi and Li, Xinyu and Wang, Qian, On smooth reformulations and direct non-smooth computations for minimax problems, J. Global Optim., 57 (2013) no. 4,1091--1111.
• Kearfott, Ralph Baker and Castille, Jessie and Tyagi, Gaurav, A general framework for convexity analysis in deterministic global optimization, J. Global Optim., 56 (2013) no. 3,765--785.
• Roy, Julie and Kearfott, R. Baker, Global optimization and singular nonlinear programs: new techniques, Reliab. Comput., 15 (2011) no. 3,242--250.
• Kearfott, R. Baker, Erratum: Validated linear relaxations and preprocessing: some experiments, SIAM J. Optim., 21 (2011) no. 1,415--416.