David P. Williamson is a Professor at Cornell University, New York, in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. He has won several awards for his work in discrete optimization, including the 2000 Fulkerson Prize, sponsored by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society. His previous book, The Design of Approximation Algorithms (Cambridge, 2011), co-authored with David B. Shmoys, won the 2013 INFORMS Lanchester Prize. He has served on several editor boards, and was editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of SIAM.