Rate My Professor William Hager

William W. Hager is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Florida, specializing in numerical analysis. He joined the University of Florida in 1988 as a Professor and was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2018. He has also served as co-director of the Center for Applied Optimization since 1992. Earlier in his career, Hager held positions at Pennsylvania State University as Associate Professor from 1980 to 1986 and Professor from 1986 to 1988, at Carnegie-Mellon University as Assistant Professor from 1976 to 1980, and at the University of South Florida as Assistant Professor from 1974 to 1976. Hager earned his B.S. degree from Harvey Mudd College in 1970, M.S. from MIT in 1971, and Ph.D. from MIT in 1974. His research interests encompass numerical analysis, optimization, optimal control, and modeling of lightning phenomena.

Hager has made significant contributions to the field through his publications, including the textbook "Applied Numerical Linear Algebra" published in 1988 by Prentice-Hall. Among his highly cited works are "Updating the inverse of a matrix" in SIAM Review (1989, 1578 citations), "A new conjugate gradient method with guaranteed descent and an efficient line search" (2005, 1559 citations), "A survey of nonlinear conjugate gradient methods" (2006, 1544 citations), and papers on pseudospectral methods for optimal control. As of March 2025, his Google Scholar profile reports over 20,338 citations, an h-index of 62, and i10-index of 152. He has edited several books, such as "Large Scale Optimization: State of the Art" (1994) and "Optimal Control: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications" (1998). Hager's honors include election as a SIAM Fellow in 2015, University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship from 2008 to 2011, Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professorship in 2015-2016, and the Chinese Operations Research Society Best Paper Prize in 2018 for “Alternating Direction Approximate Newton Method for Partially Parallel Imaging.” He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Computational Optimization and Applications since 1992 and was Associate Editor of SIAM Journal on Optimization from 2013 to 2021. Hager has delivered distinguished lectures, including the CBMS Principal Lecturer on Computational Methods in Optimal Control in 2018, and numerous plenary and invited talks at international conferences.