Margaret H. Wright

Margaret H. Wright, born on 18 February 1944, is an American computer scientist and mathematician, the Silver Professor of Computer Science and former chair of the Computer Science department at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, with research interests in optimization, linear algebra and scientific computing. She took a BS in mathematics in 1964 and an MS in computer science in 1965 at Stanford, worked at GTE Sylvania from 1965 to 1971, and completed her PhD at Stanford in 1976 with a thesis on numerical methods for nonlinearly constrained optimization. At Stanford's Systems Optimization Laboratory she worked with Philip Gill, Walter Murray and Michael Saunders, a group known as the Gang of Four, who recognised after Karmarkar's 1984 announcement that his algorithm was a special case of barrier methods. She joined Bell Labs in 1988 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for development of numerical optimization algorithms and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. She was the first woman to serve as President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.