Foreword: Special Issue on Variational Analysis, Optimization, and their Applications

This issue of Mathematical Programming, Series B, is dedicated to the life and work of R. Tyrrell Rockfellar on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Terry (as he is know to his friends) was born in Wisconsin in 1935, and received his Bachelor and Doctoral degrees at Harvard University. The title of his 1963 Ph.D. thesis, “Convex functions and dual extremal problems,” indicated the area of his first major contributions to mathematics. In 1967, after short stays in Copenhagen, Texas, and Princeton, he accepted an appointment at the University of Washington, an institution that has ever since been his “fixed point.” The presence of such mathematical luminaries as V. Klee, R. Phelps, A. Goldstein, L. Hewitt, and I. Namioka must have played a role in his decision to move to Seattle, but I suspect that the proximity of the Cascade Mountains and the Olympic Peninsula provided an equally strong enticement. However, he didn’t quite stay put! Over the years, he visited and, in some cases, developed strong relationships with other institutions: Université de Grenoble, University of Colorado (Boulder), the International Institute for Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, Austria), Universidad de Chile (Santiago) and University of Florida (Gainesville) where he is now an Adjunct Professor. Terry had been a prodigiously productive mathematician. He has presented hundreds of conference talks, often as a plenary speaker, served on the editorial board of nearly all the leading journals in the fields in which he has been active, and written nearly two hundred papers and five books. In 1982, the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) honored him with the first G. B. Dantzig Prize. In 1992, he received the von Neumann prize from SIAM, and in 1998