The Design of Approximation Algorithms

David P. Williamson is a Professor at Cornell University with a joint appointment in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and in the Department of Information Science. Prior to joining Cornell, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and a Senior Manager at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He has won several awards for his work on approximation algorithms, including the 2000 Fulkerson Prize, sponsored by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society. He has served on several editorial boards, including ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Mathematics of Operations Research, the SIAM Journal on Computing and the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. David Shmoys has faculty appointments in both the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, and he is currently Associate Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the ACM, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including Mathematics of Operations Research (for which he is currently an associate editor), Operations Research, the ORSA Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming and both the SIAM Journal on Computing and the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics; he also served as editor-in-chief for the latter.

Part I. An Introduction to the Techniques: 1. An introduction to approximation algorithms; 2. Greedy algorithms and local search; 3. Rounding data and dynamic programming; 4. Deterministic rounding of linear programs; 5. Random sampling and randomized rounding of linear programs; 6. Randomized rounding of semidefinite programs; 7. The primal-dual method; 8. Cuts and metrics; Part II. Further Uses of the Techniques: 9. Further uses of greedy and local search algorithms; 10. Further uses of rounding data and dynamic programming; 11. Further uses of deterministic rounding of linear programs; 12. Further uses of random sampling and randomized rounding of linear programs; 13. Further uses of randomized rounding of semidefinite programs; 14. Further uses of the primal-dual method; 15. Further uses of cuts and metrics; 16. Techniques in proving the hardness of approximation; 17. Open problems; Appendix A. Linear programming; Appendix B. NP-completeness.