Optimization is a subject that is widely and increasingly used in science, engineering, economics, management, industry, and other areas. It deals with selecting the best of many possible decisions in real-life environment, constructing computational methods to find optimal solutions, exploring the theoretical properties, and studying the computational performance of numerical algorithms implemented based on computational methods.

Along with the rapid development of high-performance computers and progress of computational methods, more and more large-scale optimization problems have been studied and solved. As pointed out by Professor Yuqi He of Harvard University, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, optimization is a cornerstone for the development of civilization.

Optimization Theory and Methods can be used as a textbook for an optimization course for graduates and senior undergraduates. It is the result of the author's teaching and research over the past decade. It describes optimization theory and several powerful methods. For most methods, the book discusses an idea’s motivation, studies the derivation, establishes the global and local convergence, describes algorithmic steps, and discusses the numerical performance.