Nonlinear Optimization

The areas of optimization and computer science have their origins in the late 1940s and have grown together in the ensuing time. These fields greatly influence each other and this book is about one important connection: complexity theory. Complexity theory is the theory underlying computer algorithms. How efficient is an algorithm? Does an efficient algorithm exist for a certain problem? These are the types of questions that complexity theory addresses. Even though optimization and computing date back to the 1940s, complexity theory origninated in the 1960s and is connected to many important computation problems, including optimization.