Professor Emeritus Dimitri Bertsekas, influential computer scientist and prolific author, dies at 83

Dimitri Bertsekas PhD ’71, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Emeritus Professor in Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and the Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, died on June 3 at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. He was 83 years old.

Over the course of his career, Bertsekas’ research spanned, and had a definitive influence upon, several fields, including optimization, control, large-scale computation, reinforcement learning, and artificial intelligence. He served as a consultant to various private companies; an editor for several scientific journals; the founder of a publishing company, Athena Scientific; and chief scientific advisor of Bayforest Technologies, a London-based quantitative investment company.

However, his most lasting impact may have come through his prolific authorship and co-authorship of over 20 highly influential books, monographs, and textbooks, and through his vast network of students, mentees, friends, and collaborators. Bertsekas earned his undergraduate degree at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, before obtaining his MS in electrical engineering at George Washington…