Ariel Goodwin, a doctoral candidate in Cornell’s Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM), has received the 2026 INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize. The prize celebrates an outstanding student-led paper in optimization and recognizes promising students looking toward an academic or industrial career. 

The winning paper is “Stochastic and Incremental Subgradient Methods for Convex Optimization on Hadamard Spaces.”  

“Our approach shines light on how the classical methods work in linear spaces, and allows us to design algorithms in nonlinear spaces that we could prove would work even in sharply curved nonsmooth spaces,” Goodwin said. “The new subgradient algorithms we propose carry the many features that made them so desirable in their original linear setting: They are simple, easy to implement, and we can use them to solve a variety of geometric and statistical optimization problems.” 

The annual award includes a $3,000 prize and an invitation to present the work at a special session during the INFORMS Annual Meeting, which takes place this year Nov. 1-4 in San Francisco. 

Goodwin said the recognition was both gratifying and unexpected, given the specialized nature of the research. 

“I was very happy and surprised to learn that I had won the award,” he said. “In my mind, the paper was a very fundamental contribution to how we understand optimization in nonlinear spaces, but it is a niche topic in contemporary optimization and it is always hard to say what work will receive attention.” 

CAM, a unit within Cornell Research, is an interdisciplinary program that brings together applied mathematics research and training across fields including mathematics, operations research, computer science and engineering.  

Goodwin said the program’s breadth has helped him develop his approach to research. 

“CAM is a truly unique and great program for training as an applied mathematician,” he said. “We are encouraged (and required) to complete a range of rigorous math courses from different focal areas, and have access to advisors in math, operations research, computer science, engineering, and more.” 

Goodwin’s broader doctoral research, advised by Adrian Lewis, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, focuses on extending optimization methods to nonlinear spaces where conventional tools may not apply.  

Goodwin plans to pursue a career in higher education. 

“I am pursuing an academic career, currently seeking postdoctoral and faculty positions under the broadly construed heading of applied mathematics,” he said. “Slightly more narrowly, I hope to become a professor and carry out my own research program in mathematical optimization.”