A contextualized historical analysis of the Kuhn-Tucker theorem in nonlinear programming: The impact of World War II (Q5928388)

In this extensive survey the authoress traces the history of a major theorem of 1950, at an early stage of the development of both nonlinear and linear programming. It takes the form of an inequality involving a linear combination of terms with some coefficients incorporating constraints; it has a distinguished history in mechanics, which is duly noted. Among antecedent versions of the theorem are an unpublished Master's thesis of 1939 by William Karush. The (non-)reception of the theorem in different contexts and communities is studied in some detail.