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.

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 ...

Simplex optimization is one of the simplest algorithms available to train a neural network. Understanding how simplex optimization works, and how it compares to the more commonly used back-propagation ...