Video Excerpt

GEORGE
My Hungarian friend Andrew Vazsonyi wrote a sketch about how my wife upstaged me.

IRV
I think I heard the story, but would you mind retelling it?

GEORGE
This is a cartoon drawn by my friend Andrew. If you look at this picture here it's pretty crude. You see vinegar, molasses, bran, and bouillon, meaning bouillon cubes, and you see here the simplex method and you see my wife's name Ann Dantzig spelled wrong. She spells it with an -e like the French do. The story is that I left the Pentagon in 1952 and took a position with the Rand Corporation. I decided to use the simplex method and linear programming to solve a diet problem designed for me to lose weight. Anne agreed she would prepare my meals according to what the computer declared was the optimal diet. So I called up my wife one day and said: "We've solved the diet problem for me, George Dantzig, and I want you to be ready when we run it, to cook supper and prepare it according to, by the whatever the computer says."

So it's getting late in the day and finally Anne calls me up and she says: "Well, what's for supper?" And I said: "Well, we ran the program. A couple of gallons of vinegar and some other stuff were the optimum diet. We'll just gonna have to take vinegar now as our food." Of course, we decided vinegar was not a food. The next day, we deleted vinegar from the list of foods eligible to be in the diet and it found an optimal diet containing, among other foods, 200 bouillon cubes.

IRV
Cubes dissolved in a cup of hot water to make a cup of soup?

GEORGE
Yes. Anne said: "Well, I'll buy the very best bouillon cubes money can buy, but be prepared to go to the hospital. I decided to start with five per day and gradually work up to a couple hundred bouillon cubes per day. Have you ever tasted five bouillon cubes dissolved in a cup of hot water?

IRV
No. What does it taste like?

GEORGE
It tastes like pure brine. I decided that two bouillon cubes was a proper upper limit per day. Each day we either eliminated or placed an upper bound on the amount of some other food in the diet.

IRV
You solved a new optimization problem each day by hand!

GEORGE
Not by hand. We were solving them on a RAND computer.

IRV
Ok. Was it a big effort solving a new optimization problem every day?

GEORGE
No. It was easy to drop a column from the tableau, or to place an upper bound on one of the variables.

IRV
Right.

GEORGE
And by this time Anne got tired of the whole business because, see... I was calling her telling her what's for supper and she says: "No, I'll put you on a diet." So she put me on a diet and that was the end of the story. And then my friend, Andy Vazsonyi, he's Hungarian with a sense of humor, wrote a story about it. His story does not match my recollection...

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