George Bernard Dantzig is a mathematician and the founder of linear programming, a mathematical technique that has had extensive scientific and technical applications in such areas as computer programming, logistics, and scheduling. Applicable to such endeavors as military research, industrial engineering, and business and managerial studies, linear programming is a method for formulating solutions to problems of how to optimally allocate resources among competitive activities. For example, linear programming could be used to develop a diet that contains all the necessary minimal quantities of dietary elements at a minimum cost by factoring in such variables as calories, protein, vitamins, and the prices of food. Dantzig also discovered the simplex method, an algorithm that was remarkably efficient for use in the linear programming of computers. It has been largely through Dantzig's vision that mathematical programming has become a field in which deep interactions between mathematics, computation, and application models...