Resources

Reading lists and tooling for students in my group — and for anyone who wants to get started in optimization, machine learning, and wireless.

What I Expect from My Postgraduate Students

Coding Tools

• Optimization solver — CVXPY
• Manifold optimization — Pymanopt
• Graph neural networks — DGL
• Radio environment simulator — NVIDIA Sionna

2026 update: we just vibe code now — describe the math precisely, let the coding agent write the code, then verify every line.

Books

A list of books a postgraduate student in my group should read.

Optimization

• Convex Optimization, S. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe, Cambridge University Press, 2003. [EE364b, Stanford]
• Linear and Nonlinear Programming, D. G. Luenberger and Y. Ye, Springer, 2009.
• First-Order Methods in Optimization, A. Beck, SIAM, 2017. [ELE522, Princeton]
• Numerical Optimization, J. Nocedal and S. J. Wright, Springer, 2006.
• Introduction to Linear Optimization, D. Bertsimas and J. N. Tsitsiklis, Athena Scientific, 1997.

Manifold Optimization

• Optimization Algorithms on Matrix Manifolds, P.-A. Absil, R. Mahony, and R. Sepulchre, Princeton University Press, 2008.

Compressive Sensing

• High-Dimensional Data Analysis with Low-Dimensional Models, J. Wright and Y. Ma, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Machine Learning

• Machine Learning, T. Mitchell. [10-701, CMU]
• The Elements of Statistical Learning, T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman, Springer, 2009.
• Deep Learning, I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville, MIT Press, 2016. [CS231n, Stanford]
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, C. Bishop, Springer, 2006. [CS229, Stanford]
• Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, R. S. Sutton and A. G. Barto, MIT Press, 2018.

Statistics

• High-Dimensional Probability, R. Vershynin, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• High-Dimensional Statistics: A Non-Asymptotic Viewpoint, M. Wainwright, 2019.
• Topics in Random Matrix Theory, T. Tao, American Mathematical Society, 2012.
• Asymptotic Statistics, A. W. van der Vaart, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Wireless Communication

• Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, D. Tse and P. Viswanath, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Elements of Information Theory, T. M. Cover and J. A. Thomas, Wiley, 2006.

Matrix Analysis

• Matrix Analysis, R. A. Horn and C. R. Johnson, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Linear Algebra and Its Applications, D. C. Lay, S. R. Lay, and J. J. McDonald, Pearson, 2014.
• Matrix Computations, G. H. Golub and C. F. Van Loan, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
• Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra, C. D. Meyer, SIAM, 2000.
• Advanced Linear Algebra, S. Roman, Springer, 2008.