Dear POP Members:

Four months have passed since Professor Paul Tseng went missing on August 13, 2009, during his trip to China. It was really a great shock. Without an official announcement from his university, however, I have been hesitating to mention the tragedy on the ORB Newsletter. Now I think it is time to say some words for Paul, as the chairman of the POP Working Committee.

Paul was born in Taiwan. In his boyhood, he moved to Vancouver, Canada, with his family. After he got his Ph.D. from MIT, he had mainly been working at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Thus he lived most of his life at different places in the Pacific Rim.

As everyone knows, there will be no need to introduce Paul's academic achievements in detail. He worked on many important subjects in optimization, including linear and convex programming problems, variational inequality and complementarity problems, network flow problems etc., and made significant and fundamental contributions to the progress of optimization research. In relation to POP, he served as an associate editor of Pacific Journal of Optimization.

Personally I have known Paul for almost 20 years. We visited each other many times and had several joint papers on a variety of topics such as NCP, SOCP, MPEC, SQCQP and GNEP. While working together, I was always impressed by his clear, deep and insightful ideas and his perseverance in pursuing higher goals. He was one of my best and most respected friends in the optimization community. I do not want to use the past tense to mention Paul. I wish he were alive and might appear in front of us again with a bashful smile.

We plan to put messages from Paul's friends on ORB.
Please send your message, even one or two sentences, according to the method shown at the top of the following webpage:
http://www-optima.amp.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ORB/issue34/messages.html

Masao Fukushima
Chairman, POP Working Committee