Education Boyd received an B.A. degree in mathematics,
summa cum laude, from
Harvard University in 1980, In 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden,
Career Boyd joined the faculty of
Stanford University's Electrical Engineering department in 1985. He was awarded the 2017
IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, in recognition of his efforts in education in the theory and application of optimization, which has sparked the writing of improved linear algebra and convex optimization textbooks. He has served as director of Stanford's Information Systems Laboratory, and as a visiting professor at universities including
City University of Hong Kong,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
New York University,
Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. While at Stanford, he has consulted with numerous
Silicon Valley tech companies, and founded one. His groups' CVXGEN software is used in
SpaceX's
Falcon 9 and
Falcon Heavy to guide their autonomous precision landing.
Research Boyd's primary research interests are
convex optimization, especially applications in
control,
signal processing,
machine learning, and finance. His PhD dissertation was on
Volterra series descriptions of nonlinear circuits and devices. His primary focus then turned to
automatic control systems, where he focused on applying convex optimization, specifically
linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), to a variety of control system analysis and synthesis problems. With
Craig Barratt, he authored
Linear Controller Design: Limits of Performance in 1991. In 1994, Boyd and Laurent El Ghaoui,
Eric Feron, and Ragu Balakrishnan authored the book
Linear Matrix Inequalities in System & Control Theory. Around 1999, he and Lieven Vandenberghe developed a PhD-level course and wrote the book
Convex Optimization to introduce and apply convex optimization to other fields. This work earned them the 2012 Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming. In 2012 he and Jacob Mattingley developed CVXGEN, which generates fast custom code for small, quadratic-programming-representable convex optimization problems, using an online interface. With minimal effort, it turns a mathematical problem description into a high-speed solver. Open-source software packages developed by his research group are widely used and include: • CVXPY, • SCS, first-order primal-dual cone solver for large problems • OSQP (with Oxford) Boyd is ranked top 10 scientist in the field of Engineering and Technology.
Business and patents Boyd co-founded and served as chief scientist of analog synthesis and intellectual property provider Barcelona Design, from its 1999 founding until it folded in 2005. He serves in an advisory capacity for
BlackRock, an investment management corporation; Petuum, a machine learning platform for artificial intelligence; and
H2O.ai, open source machine learning platform. He is also a co-inventor on 11 patents. On his personal website, which is visited more than 1.6 million times per year, he makes available papers, books, software, lecture notes and lecture videos. == Awards and honors ==