The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a ...

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the ...

Computer scientists have written a network flow algorithm that computes almost as fast as is mathematically possible. This algorithm computes the maximum traffic flow with minimum transport costs for ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

When Edsger W. Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959, computer networks were barely a thing. The algorithm in question found the shortest path between any two nodes on a graph, with a variant ...