Von Neumann’s mistake

From an interview with Philip Wolfe:

[John von Neumann] always contended with Dantzig that the simplex method would take an absurdly long amount of time to solve linear programming problems. It appears to be, oh, so far as I know, the one place where Johnny went very badly wrong.

Quoted in Undergraduate Convexity

5 thoughts on “Von Neumann’s mistake

  1. To be fair, the naive simplex method that he was familiar with now does look interminably slow by today’s standard. A competitive modern simplex implementation requires an enormous amount of algorithm engineering technology that was developed since the 1980s (not to even mention increases in hardware performance improvements).

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