Subject to: Philippe Toint

Hi, Philippe.

Hello, Anand. How

are you?

Fine, thank you very much.

Yeah, it's a huge honor to have you here today.

A pleasure for me.

Yeah. So today, my guest is Philippe Toine. He's an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Namur in Belgium, specializing in numerical analysis, OR, and continuous optimization. His academic career has centered on the theory, computation, and software design of large-scale nonlinear optimization, including the co-development of the Lancelot software package and contributions to trust region and filter methods. Philippe has co-authored several books and about 200 papers, the vast majority of which were published in highly regarded journals. He was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2009, received the Bill Orshad Hayes Prize in 1994 and the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization in 2006. He also served as chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society from 2010 to 2012. Philippe, I'm very grateful that you have accepted the invitation. Looking forward to having a great conversation with you.

Same for me.

All right. So, Philippe, you were born in Belgium in 1952. Where specifically?

Well, I was born in Brussels, like a lot of Belgians, actually.

Okay, so you come from the French part of the country, as I suspected?

Yes, yes. My mother was a French teacher, so I'm very much in the French culture from that point of

view. Yeah, so you mentioned your mom. What can you tell me about your family background, maybe starting with your grandparents?

My grandfather on my father's side was a lawyer working for the government and my grandfather from the mother's side was a financial officer and an archer. Interestingly enough, he was the best archer in Brussels at the time. Wow. No, that's pretty random. Yes, that's quite curious, isn't it? Yeah, amazing. I enjoyed it very much when I was a kid because he would show me his prizes from competitions and so on. So that was quite funny. Amazing. My father was an engineer, an urban planner. And as I said, my mother was a French teacher. So that gives you some background.

Yeah. Did any of your relatives were involved in the Second World War?

Not directly. I mean, my father and mother were very young at the time and my father moved to France as a youngster to avoid being drafted by the Germans. He told me a few times the story, but I don't know very much more than that.

okay do you have siblings

i have a brother who's a movie producer and i had a sister who was a philosopher and died in a car accident more than 35 years ago

wow i'm sorry to hear that but at the same time i'm again very much impressed by your brother's career like a movie producer

well yes

Yeah, so he's mainly based in Belgium or did he produce movies elsewhere?

No, mainly based in Belgium. Okay,

and how were your childhood years?

Well, I think they were quite peaceful and nothing special about them. I moved a few times with my parents from Brussels to another place south of Brussels and then from that place to a place near Liège in another part of Belgium. and then finally to my current place in Namur. So I moved quite a bit, but otherwise these were the really big events of my childhood, honestly.

Okay, so it was sort of an