History
Fermat and Lagrange found calculus-based formulas for identifying optima, while Newton and Gauss proposed iterative methods for moving towards an optimum. Historically, the first term for optimization was "linear programming", which was due to George B. Dantzig, although much of the theory had been introduced by Leonid Kantorovich in 1939. Dantzig published the Simplex algorithm in 1947, and John von Neumann developed the theory of duality in the same year.
The term programming in this context does not refer to computer programming. Rather, the term comes from the use of program by the United States military to refer to proposed training and logistics schedules, which were the problems Dantzig studied at that time.
Later important researchers in mathematical optimization include the following:
|
|
Read more about this topic: Mathematical Optimization
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)