Dimitri Bertsekas PhD ’71, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Emeritus Professor in Engineering within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator within 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 profession, 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 numerous private firms; an editor for several scientific journals; the founding father of a publishing company, Athena Scientific; and chief scientific advisor of Bayforest Technologies, a London-based quantitative investment company. Nevertheless, his most lasting impact could have come through his prolific authorship and co-authorship of over 20 highly influential books, monographs, and textbooks, and thru his vast network of scholars, mentees, friends, and collaborators.
Bertsekas earned his undergraduate degree on the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, before obtaining his MS in electrical engineering at George Washington University in 1969, and his PhD in system science at MIT in 1971. He began his faculty profession at Stanford University, where he spent three years, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent five more before returning to MIT in 1979. He would stick with MIT’s Department of EECS until 2019, at which point he became a full-time faculty member at Arizona State University at Tempe. Along the best way, Bertsekas taught, advised, and mentored students who would eventually change into his colleagues in any respect 4 institutions.
“Dimitri played a defining role in my profession,” says Asu Ozdaglar, department head of EECS at MIT. “I made a decision to alter my research focus after taking his nonlinear optimization class. The conceptual clarity and the mathematical rigor he has delivered to every topic, combined together with his ability to attach theory to essential problems established a foundation that has continued to tell my scholarly work within the years to follow.” One other former MIT student, Jinane Abounadi, now executive director of the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, still remembers Bertsekas’ tutelage as a highlight of her time as a student at MIT: “I feel so fortunate to have had Dimitri as my professor and advisor. I had the chance to study optimization, dynamic programming, and neuro-dynamic programming from a real master.”
A former student on the University of Illinois, Steven E. Shreve remembers being impressed by Bertsekas’ course on nonlinear optimization and asking if Bertsekas would consider becoming his PhD advisor. “Quite than answering my query directly, Dimitri gave me a preliminary draft of his manuscript, which eventually became his book ‘Dynamic Programming and Stochastic Control,’ and asked me to proofread it,” remembers Shreve, now Orion Hoch University Professor Emeritus within the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. “From this manuscript, I learned the idea of dynamic programming and mastered many essential special cases. Talking with Dimitri as I read, I received one-on-one instruction. When the book finally appeared, Dimitri generously acknowledged my participation, as if I had done him a favor, reasonably than the opposite way around.” The gambit was typical of Bertsekas’ understated approach to mentorship; after the primary successful collaboration, Bertsekas arranged a research fellowship for Shreve and challenged him to unravel a fundamental query in dynamic programming. “I needed to learn a superb deal of set theory to even think in regards to the query he asked,” remembers Shreve, whose work on the issue was combined with Bertsekas’ notes to create their co-authored book “Stochastic Optimal Control: The Discrete Time Case.”
“Working with Dimitri on [that book] is how I learned to jot down,” says Shreve. “I learned from Dimitri that if you wish to be recognized in your research, you could present it so others need to read it, and I learned how you can do this.”
The clarity and elegance of Bertsekas’ explanatory style would change into his educational hallmark. “Everyone recognized Dimitri’s great talents as a author, but he went far beyond that, organizing entire subjects into something that was comprehensible and a well-organized totality,” says Robert Gallager, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at MIT, who co-authored a 1987 book with Bertsekas entitled “Data Networks.” “The sector was changing rapidly then, with a factor-of-two decrease every two years in computation costs, and with optical fiber on the horizon for transmission. Dimitri and I each understood only parts of this field, with the remaining a fast-moving learning experience. Dimitri was the perfect partner on this, capable of quickly translate hard concepts into easy but accurate explanations and capable of mix my knowledge together with his into an comprehensible whole.”
Bertsekas’ close colleague in LIDS, Munther Dahleh, remembers, “what at all times struck me was that, through his writing, one could almost hear Dimitri speaking on to the reader. His intuition, clarity of thought, and distinctive perspective come through beautifully in his books. They reflect not only his profound technical contributions, but additionally his passion for teaching and his desire to assist others understand the topic at a deep level. … Specifically, his joint book with John Tsitsiklis on neuro-dynamic programming is a tour de force. It anticipated and helped define most of the ideas that later became central to reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming.”
Tsitsiklis himself remembers the co-writing process with Bertsekas fondly: “For Dimitri, research was a creative form, combining craftsmanship and the creativity that we often call art.” The definition of art and its practice was a subject of great fascination for Bertsekas, and one which he explored at length in his 2025 essay, “Academia, Art, and Life,” an try and meaningfully categorize creative work into three broadly descriptive roles — technician, craftsman, and artist — and to explore the overlaps between the three sorts of practice. Beyond his clear and lucid writing, Bertsekas was known for his strong graphic eye, a talent which he put to good use not only developing illustrations for all his textbooks, but in taking memorable and artistically inspired photographs of his worldwide travels.
Longtime collaborator and friend David Castañón, now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University, remembers Bertsekas as a real Renaissance man who drew inspiration from countless sources: “Dimitri had an insatiable curiosity for algorithmic ideas, each theory and practice. A lot of these ideas were inspired by recent technologies (parallel computers, reinforcement learning, chess-playing algorithms) … Each time we met, Dimitri would introduce recent concepts of interest; we might work out theoretical details, design and conduct numerical experiments, and generate results. Then, Dimitri’s artistic talents would take over: designing graphics as an example concepts, typesetting text and figures for the papers to be accomplished. He had a rare gift for generating concise explanations of complex concepts. These talents led to his publishing company Athena Scientific, where Dimitri and his coauthors generated elegant pedagogical volumes with broad appeal.” Tsitsiklis agrees, noting, “for Dimitri, [research] was about discovering meaning, to uncover the ‘right’ option to view a subject, enrich it, and convey it in a crystal-clear manner through his prolific writings.”
Lots of the 20-plus books either authored or co-authored by Bertsekas were adopted to be used as textbooks at MIT in subjects including data networks, nonlinear programming, dynamic programming, network optimization, parallel and distributed computation, neuro-dynamic programming, convex evaluation and optimization, probability, and reinforcement learning. Stephen Boyd, Samsung Professor within the School of Engineering at Stanford, testifies to the nice impact of Bertsekas’ collected works: “generations of researchers in optimization, control, and plenty of related areas learned these topics from Dimitri’s exquisitely clear and beautifully written text books. I used to be certainly one of them; indeed, I went into these fields in no small part due to Dimitri’s books, and his influence has been with me the entire time.”
That influence might be measured by the sheer variety of awards and honors Bertsekas collected over the course of his profession, including the INFORMS 1997 Prize for Research Excellence within the Interface Between Operations Research and Computer Science for Neuro-Dynamic Programming, the 2001 ACC John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the 2014 ACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for “contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control,” the 2014 Khachiyan Prize for Life-Time Accomplishments in Optimization, the SIAM/MOS 2015 George B. Dantzig Prize, and the 2022 IEEE Control Systems Award. Together together with his coauthor John Tsitsiklis, he was awarded the 2018 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize for the contributions of the research monographs “Parallel and Distributed Computation” and “Neuro-Dynamic Programming.” In 2001, Bertsekas was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for “pioneering contributions to fundamental research, practice and education of optimization/control theory.”
Nevertheless, a more personal measure of Bertsekas’ impact might be taken by the heat and affection with which his friends, co-workers, and former students uniformly remember him. Co-author John Tsitsiklis wrote, “I used to be most fortunate to be certainly one of his apprentices, and to have lived his warmth and friendship.” His former student at MIT, Angelia Nedich, later became Bertsekas’ colleague at Arizona State University. She remembers: “Dimitri was an exceptional mind, a gifted soul that shed light for us seekers, but at the identical time he was very humble as he enjoyed easy moments of life, a sip of excellent coffee, a bite of flavorful food, or a glass of spicy margarita on our road trips in Southwest. That’s how I like to recollect him.”
Former student Benjamin Van Roy, now a professor at Stanford, wrote in regards to the transformation of Bertsekas from authority figure to friend (and the topic of friendly teasing). “I recall the intimidating comments of more senior PhD students as I started my very own PhD journey in LIDS. Some referred to Dimitri as an “immortal.” One other comment I recall fondly — and infrequently reminded Dimitri about — was: “Professor Bertsekas is a very handsome man!” Their bond continued long after Van Roy’s graduation. “Dimitri was a treasure to humanity: certainly one of the nice scholars of our time, a Renaissance man, and an outstanding role model. I used to be privileged to be amongst the various he mentored, and much more privileged to count him as a longtime friend.” Yuchao Li, a postdoc mentored by Bertsekas at Arizona State University, remembers his mentor as an almost inexhaustible source of each inspiration and support: “For me, Professor Bertsekas was like a loving father, filled with infinite wisdom. … He appeared to know every part, yet he remained deeply humble and open-minded. He was at all times desperate to help, even on the slightest sign of difficulty in my life. He instilled in me a long-lasting faith within the easiest qualities of human beings, and I’ll strive to hold that faith forward.”
Bertsekas was preceded in death by his son Costas. He’s survived by his wife Joanna Bertsekas (née Palashas); his son Telis Bertsekas and his wife Wendy Bertsekas; and three grandchildren, Melina, Alexandros, and Leonidas.