Laurent Lessard, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, was first author on one of the most frequently downloaded papers from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Optimization. The paper, “Analysis and design of optimization algorithms via integral quadratic constraints,” describes a method to analyze iterative optimization algorithms, which he and his collaborators leverage into a new strategy to search for algorithms with the desired characteristics. Other authors on the paper include Benjamin Recht and Andrew Packard of the University of California at Berkeley.