The death of mathematician George Dantzig is a scientific watershed. Dantzig developed "linear programming" and the simplex method, used to solve complex efficiency problems for large organizations.

YOU MIGHT not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, ...

(This material is not covered in Fleischer. A good reference text is Hillier and Lieberman, ``Introduction to Operations Research'', published by Holden-Day; the fourth edition of this text came out ...