What in the world is a linear program?

What is a linear program and why do we care? Today I’m going to introduce you to the exciting world of optimization, which is the mathematical field of maximizing or minimizing an objective function subject to constraints. The most fundamental topic in optimization is linear programming, which is where the objective and the constraints are linear functions of our decision variables. Surprisingly, many problems can be modeled as linear programs. Here, we cover a geometric packing problem where we try to fit the largest circle into a pentagon. We show how, using some tricks, this problem can be formulated as a linear program. Then, we plot the constraints to find the feasible region and find the optimal solution. This is a submission for #SoME2 Music: I Need to Start Writing Things Down by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/darkglow/ Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/