Recently, Mathematics of Operations Research (MOR), the flagship international journal in operations research theory, celebrated its 50th anniversary. To recap the key achievements in the field of operations research over the past half-century and honor the pivotal contributors to the discipline’s development, the journal organized senior editorial board members and field experts to select the "50 Classic Papers in 50 Years". Professor Yinyu Ye, Chair Professor at Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a towering figure in the international field of operations research and optimization, and former Kwoh-Ting Li Professor at Stanford University, had two papers successfully selected. His sustained accumulation and significant contributions in the core field of operations research and optimization have once again received high recognition from the international academic community.

As an authoritative journal under the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), MOR has been a vital platform for theoretical research in mathematical operations research since its founding in 1976. Its published works feature both rigorous theoretical depth and broad application value. The selection was based on three core criteria: academic innovation, field influence, and subsequent inheritance. After careful screening from thousands of papers published by the journal over the years, the final 50 selected works basically cover the core development context of operations research in the past half-century. Certain selected papers are directly related to the landmark contributions of Nobel laureates in Economics. For instance, Myerson’s (1981) foundational analysis of optimal auction mechanisms, Roth’s (1982) crucial step in advancing stable matching to implementable market rules, and Milgrom & Weber’s (1985) general technical framework for games with incomplete information. These works are not only benchmarks in MOR’s history but also directly or indirectly serve as important cornerstones of Nobel Prize-level theoretical frameworks, demonstrating MOR’s unique vision in selecting academic achievements that "truly shape the future of the discipline".

The two selected papers, focusing on interior-point methods and the algorithmic theory of Markov Decision Processes (MDP), are representative achievements of his in-depth research in the corresponding fields:

Paper 1: Core Progress in Interior-Point Methods — Research on Adaptive-Step Primal-Dual Algorithms

Title: On Adaptive-Step Primal-Dual Interior-Point Algorithms for Linear Programming

Publication Information: Mathematics of Operations Research, 1993, Vol.18(4): 964-981

Authors: Shinji Mizuno, Michael J. Todd, Yinyu Ye

This paper proposes a framework for adaptive-step primal-dual interior-point algorithms, which is an important foundational work in the field of interior-point methods for linear programming. It is also one of the core algorithms widely adopted in major commercial solvers such as GUROBI, COPT, and CPLEX.

Paper 2: Breakthrough in MDP Algorithmic Theory — Proof of Strong Polynomial Time under Fixed Discount Rate

Title: The Simplex and Policy-Iteration Methods Are Strongly Polynomial for the Markov Decision Problem with a Fixed Discount Rate

Publication Information: Mathematics of Operations Research, 2011, Vol.36(4): 593-603

Author: Yinyu Ye

This paper was the first to prove the strong polynomial time complexity of the simplex method and policy-iteration method for MDP problems with a fixed discount rate, solving a long-standing fundamental question in the field. This work once won the Best Paper Award in Optimization from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

The selection of two papers into MOR’s "50 Classic Papers in 50 Years" is not only recognition of Professor Yinyu Ye’s individual academic work but also demonstrates the contributions of Chinese scholars in the international field of operations research. In the future, it is expected that more scholars will inherit this academic spirit, continue to delve into basic theoretical research, and contribute more to the interdisciplinary integration of operations research and other disciplines.