Welcome to L’Équipe Z, the research group of Professor ZHANG Zaikun.

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Recent Updates

• Oct 27, 2026 · New preprint — “NextEval: An Agent-Based Solver and Benchmark for Derivative-Free Optimization”, by CHEN Shuo, CUI Li, HUANG Cunxin, LIU Ya-Feng, XIE Minghang, XU Meng, and ZHANG Zaikun.
• Jun 2, 2026 · New preprint — “Non-convergence Analysis of Probabilistic Direct Search”, by HUANG Cunxin and ZHANG Zaikun.

Research Interests

• Theory, algorithms, and software of mathematical optimization, especially
  • derivative-free (zeroth-order) methods
  • randomized methods
  • large-scale problems
  • noisy problems

Recruitment

L’Équipe Z welcomes motivated students, postdoctoral researchers, and software engineers interested in mathematical optimization. See Professor ZHANG’s recruitment announcement for more information.

Quotations

From him (Alexander Grothendieck) and his example, I have also learned not to take glory in the difficulty of a proof: difficulty means we have not understood. The ideal is to be able to paint a landscape in which the proof is obvious.

— Pierre Deligne

The art of doing mathematics is forgetting about the superfluous information.

— Hendrik W. Lenstra, Jr.

There is nothing so practical as a good theory.

— Kurt Z. Lewin