Michel Xavier Goemans (born December, 1964) is a Belgian-American professor of applied mathematics and the RSA Professor of Mathematics at MIT working in discrete mathematics and combinatorial optimization at CSAIL and MIT Operations Research Center.^[2]

Goemans earned his doctorate in 1990 from MIT.^[1] Goemans is the "Leighton Family Professor" of Applied Mathematics at MIT and an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo. He was also a professor at the University of Louvain and a visiting professor at the RIMS of the University of Kyoto.

In 1991 he received the A.W. Tucker Prize. From 1995 to 1997 he was a Sloan Research Fellow. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.^[3] For the academic year 2007–2008 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Goemans is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2008),^[4] a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012),^[5] and a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2013).^[6] In 2000 he was awarded the MOS-AMS Fulkerson Prize^[7] for joint work with David P. Williamson on the semidefinite programming approximation algorithm for the maximum cut problem. In 2012 Goemans was awarded the Farkas Prize.^[8] In 2022 he received the AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research.^[9]

His hobby is sailing. Goemans has Belgian and US citizenship.