Sad News: Professor Naum Z. Shor Passed Away

We were just informed by Firduovsi Sharifov, that Academician of the
Ukrainian Academy of Science, Professor Naum Z. Shor passed away of
Sunday,  evening, 26.02.2006.

Naum was a friend to many of us and a very valued colleague to many
mathematicians across the world. He made significant contributions to
nonlinear and stochastic programming, numerical techniques for non
smooth optimization, discrete optimization problems, matrix
optimization, dual quadratic bounds in multi-extremal programming
problems.

Professor Shor's long professional life is tied to the V.M.Glushkov
Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, Ukraine. He started to work there in
1958 after graduating from the Kiev National Taras Shevchenko University
by the invitation of Professor V.M.Glushkov, the supervisor of his
diploma in differential algebra. He never changed his place of work. In
this Institute he made his career from an engineer (1959) to the head of
Department ''Methods for solving complex optimization problems'' (1983,
till date). Professor Shor is well known not only for the method of
generalized gradient descent which he proposed in 1962, but also for the
family of methods which involve space transformation:
   
(a) with space dilation in the direction of a subgradient;
 
(b) with space dilation in the direction of the difference of two
successive subgradients (the so-called r-algorithm).

It is interesting to note that well known ellipsoid method independently
proposed by A.S.Nemirovsky and D.B.Yudin is a special case of Shor's
subgradient type methods with the space dilation in the direction of a
subgradient.

We are saddened to convey this news.

Boris Goldengorin,
Wim K. Klein Haneveld,
Gerard Sierksma,
University of Groningen,
The Netherlands