Éva Tardos, Cornell professor of computer science, has received the George B. Dantzig Prize, awarded jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Established in 1979, the Dantzig Prize is awarded for "original research, which by its originality, breadth and scope is having a major impact on the field of mathematical programming." The prize, consisting of a certificate and a cash award that varies from year to year, was presented July 11 at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Boston.

Tardos' research focuses on "optimization," in which a computer is asked to find the most efficient way to organize a large number of elements. Examples range from airline scheduling to the management of communication networks. The computer must try every possible combination to find which is best, and sometimes this can add up to days, months or years of processing. Tardos has developed approaches that approximate ideal solutions and prevent the computer from becoming lost in unsolvable problems.

Tardos joined the Cornell faculty in 1989. She is currently a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Packard fellow, a Sloan fellow and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. She received the Fulkerson Prize in 1988. She is the editor of several journals, including SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of the ACM, and Combinatorica.