As narrated by Dantzig in many retrospective articles, he invented linear programming in the summer of 1947 with helpful suggestions of Leonid Hurwicz and Tjalling Koopmans. The first computational experiment with the simplex method finished April 10th,^[1] 1948. This was the famous diet problem computation, described from Dantzig's point of view in Linear Programming and Extensions and described from the computer's point of view in When Computers Were Human (David Alan Grier). Notably, this computation was performed by hand: 5 people worked on this for 21 days.^[2]

Human computers of the Mathematical Tables Project, where the 1948 diet LP computation was performed.

Even after this demonstration, a number of real applications of LP were performed by hand. Lets look a bit of a timeline for electronic computers first. The first specialized simplex method for transportation problems^[3] was coded in 1950 for the SEAC. In 1952, Orchard-Hays got the first simplex code working on the IBM Card Programmed Calculator, and later on the more recognizeable IBM 701 machines. These early hardwares and softwares were very error-prone and needed a lot of highly-skilled babysitting, but Orchard-Hays' later codes were commercially useful.

Charnes, Cooper and Mellon famously presented the first work on LP in fossil fuel blending in 1951. They do not directly specify, but we can be fairly sure that their computation was done by hand. Although the LP had no workable structure that aided computation, it was fairly small problem: maybe 9 inputs, 6 outputs.

Dantzig writes in 1954^[4] that often, when studying a particular structure of LP, human hands with a specialized algorithm were faster than an electronic computer with a general LP code. For example, a transportation problem^[3] with a hundred combined rows (sources) and columns (sinks) can be 'handled nicely by clerks'. Dantzig writes that already in 1953, Heinz^[5] used LP to ship ketchup from 6 plants to 70 warehouses. We can be fairly sure that a small transportation problem like this was solved by hand. And this is presumably without the 1956 Ford-Fulkerson algorithm.

One other application of a transportation problem solved by hand is described in 1955^[5]. The RAND Corperation employed a large number of computers,^[6] as well as many researchers who had computations they wanted to see performed. In order to form a schedule that takes both priority and urgency into account, a transportation problem was formulated. Every week has a number of computer-hours available, every tasks needs a certain hours before it is completed. Dantzig gives an example where one has 18 projects and 10 weeks, resulting in a problem with 28 equations in 180 unknowns. He adds upper bounds of 40 hours on the individual edges to indicate that only one person can work on a project at a time.

This is perhaps the ultimate showcase that human computers remained important well into the mid-1950s: humans were solving an LPs, by hand, to decide in what order the different computing tasks should be solved (also by humans).

[1]

Date is from the NBS report. Note the involvement of famous matrix theorist Olga Taussky-Todd. I am not aware of any other document crediting her involvement with LP or computation. I asked David Alan Grier about this, he speculated that perhaps Taussky-Todd did not want to be credited: computation was seen as low-skilled (women's) work, and Taussky-Todd may not have felt comfortable being associated with that.

[2]	Correspondence from Dantzig to Von Neumann. The 5 computers were supervised for 4 hours per day by Jack Laderman. Note that only Laderman is credited by name, not the computers and not Taussky-Todd.

[3]	Given a bipartite graph, with supplies of a commodity available on the one side and demands on the other side, how to route the goods at minimal cost?

[5]	Recent Advances in Linear Programming, Dantzig, April 12th, 1955.

[6]	Dantzig writes "The RAND Corporation has extensive computing facilities that are in constant use by the research personnel." Despite how he phrases it, he is talking about human being here.

[4]	Status of Solution of Large-Scale Linear Programming Problems, Dantzig, November 30th, 1954.

As an academic, having an online presence gives you a big leg up. Some of the key functions are:

1. collect your papers together for easy perusal

2. show who your advisor and advisees are (this helps editors know if you have a conflict of interest as a potential reviewer)

3. picture (people want to recognize you at events)

4. email address (so that your colleagues can reach you)

If you are a PhD student, and you have at least one paper online, then you should make your own website right now.

My first website was made using Academic Pages. It worked well enough, until one day in 2023 Jekyll started screaming and stopped compiling. Since then I have been writing html by hand. Starting today, I want to try something new. I rebuilt my website using Frankin. Its another static website generator, with easy support for LaTeX and code highlighting. I host my website through GitHub Pages, linked to my own domain name.

With the new Franklin tech, I want to start blogging. They say its good to practice your writing frequently. The first few posts will be information that I have tweeted before. Putting that into more a more archive-friendly and longer form format will be my first step towards making it into something useful.

At least, I think I will. Depends on how well this Github Pages deployment with the new tech will go lmaosob