Name: Introductory Lectures on Convex Optimization
ISBN: 9781441988539

Introductory Lectures on Convex Optimization

This is the first elementary exposition of the main ideas of complexity theory for convex optimization. Up to now, most of the material can be found only in special journals and research monographs. The book covers optimal methods and lower complexity bounds for smooth and non-smooth convex optimization. A separate chapter is devoted to polynomial-time interior-point methods. Audience: The book is suitable for industrial engineers and economists.

What Hacker News says

bkcooperJul 2021

Nocedal and Wright is good. +1 also to the suggestions for Boyd and Vandenberghe. I really like Boyd's writing in general; he has coauthored some good review articles on proximal algorithms and ADMM.

A couple of other suggestions:

Nesterov's Introductory Lectures on Convex Optimization. This one is pretty tough sledding, but I found the perspectives in the first chapter particularly to be enlightening. It seems like there's a newer Springer book which is probably an expansion on this.

Bertsekas's Nonlinear Programming. Bertsekas has written a lot of books, and there's a fair amount of overlapping going on. This one seemed to be the one that has the most nuts and bolts about the basics of optimization.

EDIT: If you want more understanding of convexity beyond what's presented in these books, Rockafellar's Convex Analysis is helpful.

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okintheoryOct 2026

"A strict complexity gap between gradient-based and derivative-free Lipschitz convex optimization" has been known for decades. It's covered in standard textbooks like Nesterov's "Introductory lectures on convex optimization". That AI result is about establishing the gap in a fairly niche accuracy regime.

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