 Phil Wolfe's career had an astounding start.
"Astounding Science Fiction magazine was almost the only outlet of good science fiction in 1949," Wolfe recalls, speaking with e-Optimization.com's Irv Lustig. "There was a story in the October issue called 'The Finan-Seer.' It's about a group of college professors who learned a new subject called the theory of games. They used it to beat the stock market and build up the endowment for their university. I had never heard of the theory of games."
Wolfe heard plenty more in the years to come. Over the next half century, at institutions like the Pentagon, Princeton, and the Rand Corporation, he had a hand in major advances like the simplex method, the ad hoc procedure, the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, and the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition algorithm. Along the way, he helped develop linear programming on first-generation computers, writing some of the earliest applications for languages like Fortran.
In this Trailblazers interview, Wolfe discusses his pioneering work in game theory and linear programming, evoking the era that laid the foundation for modern optimization. "The idea that the theory of games might spread over the world and solve all our economic and social problems, that was terrific," he says. "It was inspiring."
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