Alex L. Wang
Assistant Professor of Quantitative Methods
Daniels School of Business
Purdue University
Office: KRAN 463
Email: [email protected]
If you are a motivated student interested in optimization and/or data science, I encourage you to apply to Purdue’s PhD program in Quantitative Methods and to mention my name in your application.
About
I am an Assistant Professor at Purdue University in the Daniels School of Business (Quantitative Methods Group).
I received my Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (2022), where I was supervised by Fatma Kılınç-Karzan. In Fall 2022, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in the Optimization for and with Machine Learning project, where I was supervised by Monique Laurent.
My work has been recognized by the INFORMS Optimization Society 2021 Best Student Paper Award and an ICML Outstanding Paper Award 2022.
Research interests
My research focuses on extending classical optimization theory towards modern settings, especially those inspired by data science tasks. Recent topics of interest include: semidefinite programming, first-order methods, and nonconvex quadratic programming.
Recent papers/writing:
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Optimal Subgradient Methods for Lipschitz Convex Optimization with Error Bounds
Alex L. Wang
December 2025 [arXiv] -
Subgame Perfect Methods in Nonsmooth Convex Optimization
(ɑ) Benjamin Grimmer and Alex L. Wang
November 2025 [arXiv] -
Beyond Minimax Optimality: A Subgame Perfect Gradient Method
(ɑ) Benjamin Grimmer, Kevin Shu, and Alex L. Wang
December 2024 [arXiv][code] -
Blog post: What is momentum? A PEP view
December 2024