Xin-She Yang is Reader at the Middlesex University[1] and was a senior research scientist at National Physical Laboratory, best known as a developer of various heuristic algorithms for engineering optimization. He obtained a DPhil in applied mathematics from Oxford University.[2] He has given invited keynote talks at SEA2011,[3] SCET2012, BIOMA2012[4] and Mendel Conference on Soft Computing (Mendel 2012). He has been elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Application in 2021. He has been on the prestigious list of Highly Cited Researchers since 2016 by Clarivate Analyatics/Web of Science.[5]
He created the firefly algorithm[6] (2008), cuckoo search (2009),[7][8][9] bat algorithm (2010),[10] and flower pollination algorithm (2012).
Since 2009, more than 1000 peer-reviewed research papers cited the firefly algorithm and/or cuckoo search.[citation needed]