Math / Operations Research

Choosing the Best Under Constraints

Optimization is the mathematics of choosing. Name what you want more or less of (the objective), what you cannot violate (the constraints), and what you control (the decisions). Linear programming solves a large class of these exactly and runs much of logistics, scheduling, and finance; gradient methods tune the parameters of machine-learning models. Industrial and operations engineers use it to decide where time, stock, and people should go.