There are many excellent books on optimization and it is important to justify the need for yet another one. The motivation for this book stems from my observations of the orientation of typical optimization texts used in optimization courses compared to the needs of students in our engineering program. Many optimization books and courses concentrate on the design of algorithms, with less attention to adapting a problem to make it amenable to solution by an existing algorithm. That is, many optimization books are about how to design optimization algorithms, about how to write optimization software, or about how to apply optimization software to an existing problem formulation.

While this book is about the solution of simultaneous equations and optimization problems, it is not primarily about how to design algorithms, write software, or solve existing problems. Instead, it is about how to formulate new problems so that they can be solved by existing software.

Given the fabulous panoply of well-written optimization software available today, the skill of formulating a problem so that it is solvable with standard software is the most widely applicable skill for most engineers in our graduate program. Increasingly, the “scarce resource” is the ability to formulate problems, rather than the hardware or optimization software itself. This book is primarily designed for people who have a simultaneous equations problem or an optimization problem in mind and who want to formulate it so that it is solvable with standard software.