The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at UC Berkeley, George Dantzig—a first-year graduate student—copied two problems ...

The death of mathematician George Dantzig is a scientific watershed. Dantzig developed "linear programming" and the simplex method, used to solve complex efficiency problems for large organizations.

While sitting in a courtroom, waiting to find out if he would be chosen for jury duty, Daniel Spielman had a revelation-all the work he and colleague Shanghua Teng had built up over the past three ...