Andrew McRae, together with Nicolas Boumal (EPFL, Switzerland), received the 2026 SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Best Paper Prize. This prize is awarded every three years to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper, as determined by the prize committee, on a topic in optimization published in the four calendar years preceding the award year.
Andrew and Nicolas received the prize for their paper “Benign Landscapes of Low-Dimensional Relaxations for Orthogonal Synchronization on General Graphs”. This work provides rigorous theoretical guarantees on the nonconvex landscape of a low-dimensional relaxation for orthogonal group synchronization problems, which appear in many practical applications such as robotics, imaging, and computer vision.
See the interview with the prize winners.