O.R./Analytics at Work Blog

That the concept of zero and the now widely used, indispensable decimal numeric system (imprecisely called Arabic numerals) came from India is old news -- a piece of trivia circulated often enough to have little or no surprise value. There is more, much more, to ancient Indian mathematics than these iconic contributions.

The New York Times Magazine Ideas Issue is a gold mine for a blogger in operations research. Either OR principles are a key part of the idea, or OR principles show why the “idea” is not such a great idea after all. One nice article this week is not part of the “ideas” article...