On “Pre-historic” Linear Programming and the Figure of the Earth

Richard W. Cottle ()
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Richard W. Cottle: Stanford University

Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 2017, vol. 175, issue 1, No 13, 255-277

Abstract: Abstract An important scientific problem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to determine the figure of the earth. This problem attracted the attention of many notable people, one of whom was Roger Joseph Boscovich a Jesuit priest and natural scientist who formulated—and gave an algorithm for solving—linearly constrained optimization problems whose minimand is the sum of the absolute values of the errors, i.e., a special linear regression model. After first recounting some of the rich history of this development, the present expository note focuses on the method of Boscovich, exploring its interpretation as a variant of the simplex algorithm for linear programming applied to problems of that form.

Keywords: Linear regression; Linear programming; Optimization history; Geodesy; 01A50; 49N10; 49M30; 62J05; 86A30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1007/s10957-017-1165-5

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