Surprising Limits Discovered in Quest for Optimal Solutions

Our lives are a succession of optimization problems. They occur when we search for the fastest route home from work or attempt to balance cost and quality on a trip to the store, or even when we decide how to spend limited free time before bed. These scenarios and many others can be represented as a mathematical optimization problem. Making the best decisions is a matter of finding their optimal solutions. And for a world steeped in optimization, two recent results provide both good and bad news.