Broad overview of optimization problems (see handout). The most general formulation is actually quite difficult to solve, so most algorithms (especially the most efficient algorithms) solve various special cases, and it is important to know what the key factors are that distinguish a particular problem. There is also something of an art to the problem formulation itself, e.g. a nondifferentiable minimax problem can be reformulated as a nicer differentiable problem with differentiable constraints.

Introduction to adjoint methods and the remarkable fact that one can compute the gradient of a complicated function with about the same number of additional operations as computing the function once.