What do the following—planning an airline hub, political gerrymandering, and a museum renovation—have in common? They’re all problems that can be tackled by mathematicians using a process called ...

An optimization problem is one where you have to make the best decision (choose the best investments, minimize your company’s costs, find the class schedule with the fewest morning classes, or so on).

The traveling salesman problem is considered a prime example of a combinatorial optimization problem. Now a Berlin team led by theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert of Freie Universität Berlin ...