Subject to: Robert Vanderbei

Hi, Bob. Hi. It's great to have you here.

Great to be here.

Yeah, so today my guest is Bob Vanderby. He's a professor in the Department of OR and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. In addition, he holds courtesy appointments in the departments of mathematics, astrophysics, computer science, and mechanical and aerospace engineering. He's also a member of the program in applied and computational mathematics and is a founding member of the Ben Hines Center for Finance. Beyond Princeton, he is a fellow of AMS, SIAM, and INFORMS. Within INFORMS, he has served as president of the Optimization Society and the Computing Society, and is the 2017 winner of the Hashin Prize for his work in optimization. He also serves on the advisory board of the journal Mathematical Programming Compensation. In addition to hundreds of research papers, he has written four books. The first one, a textbook entitled Linear Programming Foundations and Extensions, now in its fifth edition. The second one is Welcome to the Universe in 3D, an astronomy book written jointly with Neil deGrasse Tyson, J. Richard Godd and Michael Strauss. The third one, Sizing Up the Universe, an introductory astronomy book written jointly with J. Richard Godd. And finally, the fourth one, Real and Convex Analysis, a textbook written jointly with Erhan Sinlar. Thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It's really an honor to have you here.

This is going to be fun.

Yeah. So Bob, let's start. So you were born in 1955 in the US.

From which part of the country do you originally come? I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Right. Is it a small town, a big town?

It's either the second or third largest town in Michigan. Detroit, of course, is the largest. And I can't remember if Grand Rapids is number two or number three. Lansing's the capital. I think So those are the three main towns.

Right. Do you come from an upper or lower class family?

Lower income. What do you call it? Lower middle income, I think.

Okay.

Is I think the terminology people use from when I was growing up. My dad didn't go to college. My mom didn't go to college. They were into sporty type stuff, but they weren't into academic type stuff. And I just I just liked learning the things that I was learning. And so it was a very different world for me. But no, they didn't go to college and didn't make a lot of money. When I was young, my mom didn't work. She was a stay-at-home mom. But then when I was in high school, I think she started working as an accountant to make a little bit more money. But we were kind of the lower side of the middle class, I think is what it's called.

Right. So your father, he worked in a factory.

Yeah, he worked in a factory. Just putting things together, you know, cook this to this, pass it on.

Got it. I've read somewhere that you have a twin sister. And this is not the only case in your family, right?

Yeah. I have a twin sister. Her name is Beth. My mom is a twin. She has a twin brother. His name is Fred. I have twin daughters. Their names are Marcy and Diana. And my twin sister married somebody who had twins from a previous marriage. So there's twins everywhere.

Yeah. And I mean, are you different from your sister