Richard A. Tapia
American mathematician
Richard Alfred Tapia (March 25, 1938 – May 22, 2026) was an American mathematician and academic. He held the title of University Professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the university's highest academic rank. In 1996 President Bill Clinton awarded Tapia the Presidential Award for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Mentoring. In 2011 President Barack Obama awarded Tapia the National Medal of Science. He was the Maxfield and Oshman professor of engineering; associate director of graduate studies, Office of Research and Graduate Studies; and director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University.
Tapia's mathematical research was centered on mathematical optimization and iterative methods for nonlinear problems, with his most recent work focused on algorithms for constrained optimization and interior point methods for linear and nonlinear programming.
Early life and education
Richard Alfred Tapia was born on March 25, 1938, in Santa Monica, California, to Amado and Magda Tapia, who both immigrated to the United States from Mexico. He and his twin brother were the oldest of five siblings, with two younger brothers and sister. His father worked for Japanese-American horticulturists in southern California.
Tapia received his BA in mathematics in1961 from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard A. Tapia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.