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✦   LIBER   ✦

Review of the book by Alexander Schrijver: Combinatorial Optimization: Polyhedra and Efficiency

✍ Scribed by László Lovász

Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
2005
Tongue
English
Weight
131 KB
Volume
33
Category
Article
ISSN
0167-6377

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

Finding the minimum or maximum or a function is a familiar task for everybody studying calculus. In the simplest case when the function is defined on an interval and is smooth, finding the roots of the derivative leaves us with the trivial task of evaluating the function at these points and at the endpoints of the interval, and picking the best of these.

Considering this last step "trivial" reflects a bias: that the goal of mathematics is to study and understand the infinite. This is best illustrated by a quote from the book under review [2], where Schrijver in turn quotes from an address of Thorndike to the meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1950.

📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES

Combinatorial optimization by William J.
Combinatorial optimization by William J. Cook, William H. Cunningham, William R. Pulleyblank and Alexander Schrijver, Wiley, New York, 1998. ISBN 0-471-55894-X. No. of pages: 355. Price: £24.95.
✍ V. J. Rayward-Smith 📂 Article 📅 1998 🏛 John Wiley and Sons 🌐 English ⚖ 16 KB

Combinatorial optimization is one of the most active areas of applied mathematics, with wide application throughout industry and commerce. It is taught in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses within mathematics, OR and computer science departments. This text, written by some of the most resp