Course Culture
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Leonhard Euler"He calculated just as men breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air." The Bridges of KonigsburgWhen Euler solved the toy problem of traversing the bridges of Konigsburg, he gave birth to graph theory. The original paper is "Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis" and appears Commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae, 1736, pp. 128-140. |
Richard Karp"For his continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness." [from the award citation of the 1985 Turing Award]. Karp's 21 NP-Complete Problems |
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Jack Edmonds"Jack Edmonds has been one of the creators of the field of combinatorial optimization and polyhedral combinatorics. His 1965 paper 'Paths, Trees, and Flowers' [1] was one of the first papers to suggest the possibility of establishing a mathematical theory of efficient combinatorial algorithms . . . " [from the award citation of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize]. Reading: "A Glimpse of Heaven" taken from History of Mathematical Programming: A Collection of Personal Reminiscences. |