Travelling Salesman

The movie is fantastic and quite good mathematically. The movie is about the mathematicians who worked on the Traveling Salesman Problem.

The movie is fantastic and quite good mathematically. It is a bit like the play by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt who wrote Die Physiker similarly discussing scientific ethics questions. A mysterious bodyguard is listening to all of the conversations (which is a bit strange, given that everything is so top secret). In Dürrenmatts’ play, there is a psychiatrist Mathilde von Zahnd who eavesdrops on the conversation. In the Travelling Salesman movie, there is also a bit of cold war atmosphere, similarly as in the 1962 play of Duerrenmatt, when NATO and WTO were the players.

A detail: Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin formulated the P=NP problem. The mathematicians Michael Garey and David S Johnson were mentioned, who worked on the Traveling Salesman Problem and wrote Computers and intractability.

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