Dimitri Bertsekas, a Greek mathematician and computer scientist whose work shaped nonlinear programming, convex optimization and dynamic programming, died on June 3, 2026, at age 83.
Born in Athens in 1942, he studied at the National Technical University of Athens before continuing at George Washington University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a doctorate in system science in 1971. He went on to spend much of his career at MIT, teaching in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and building a reputation through research and textbooks in optimization, control, reinforcement learning and applied probability.
His work also extended to data communication and transportation networks, and electric power generation. Among the honors he received were the John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, the George B. Dantzig Prize, the John von Neumann Theory Prize and the IEEE Control Systems Award.