Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war theater-all are complexes of numerous interrela… - George Bernard 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

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.

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.