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.

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 ...