George Dantzig Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war theater-all are complexes of numerous interrelated activities. Differences may exist in the goals to be achieved, the particular processes involved, and the magnitude of effort. Nevertheless, it is possible to abstract the underlying essential similarities in the management of these seemingly disparate systems.

George Dantzig
If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming.

George Dantzig
Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war, the management of finances —all require the coordination of interrelated activities. What these complex undertakings share in common is the task of constructing a statement of actions to be performed, their timing and quantity (called a program or schedule), that, if implemented, would move the system from a given initial status as much as possible towards some defined goal

George Dantzig
In retrospect... it is interesting to note that the original problem that started my research is still outstanding — namely the problem of planning or scheduling dynamically over time, particularly planning dynamically under uncertainty. If such a problem could be successfully solved it could eventually through better planning contribute to the well-being and stability of the world.

George Dantzig
Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives.

George Dantzig
All such problems can be formulated as mathematical programming problems. Naturally, we can propose many sophisticated algorithms and a theory but the final test of a theory is its capacity to solve the problems which originated it.

George Dantzig
I had no experience at the time with problems in higher dimensions, and I didn't trust my geometrical intuition. For example, my intuition told me that the procedure would require too many steps wandering from one adjacent vertex to the next. In practice, it takes few steps. In brief, one's intuition in higher dimensional space is not worth a damn!

George Dantzig
I find it amusing that there could be these two very different ways to organize research - one anarchistic, the other dictatorial, and yet both highly efficient. Apparently any form of government can be made to work if the people are motivated enough.

George Dantzig
I didn't discover the linear programming model all in a flash. It evolved.

George Dantzig
If I had known that the problems were not homework but were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics, I probably would not have thought positively, would have become discouraged, and would never have solved them.

George Dantzig