Eldon Hansen

Eldon Robert Hansen is a mathematician who has published widely in global optimization theory and interval analysis. His primary publications include Global Optimization Using Interval Analysis (1992), A Table of Series and Products (1975), and Topics in Interval Analysis (1969). He also co-authored a number of works with the mathematician William Walster.

Hansen completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1960 on Jacobi methods and Block-Jacobi methods for computing matrix eigenvalues (Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 1961). He was born in 1927 near Rochester, WA.

Hansen's algorithm extended the classical Gauss-Seidel algorithm to interval computations, and has been used to compute uncertainties in delta wing composite structures (Delcroix, Boyer, & Braibant)

Hansen's method used interval analysis to solve a supposedly "insoluble" global optimization problem. The method was originally described for both the one-dimensional and multi-dimensional cases in the 1980s, and is more fully described in the 1992 Global Optimization Using Interval Analysis and the 2nd edition of the book written with William Walster in 2003, and was translated into Russian in 2012.

Dr. Hansen taught at Stanford University, The University of California at Berkeley, San Jose State College, Oxford University, and Washington State University; and he worked at Lockheed in Palo Alto, California.