History of the Diet Problem

History of the Diet Problem

The diet problem is one of the first optimization problems to be studied back in the 1930's and 40's. It was first motivated by the Army's desire to meet the nutritional requirements of the field GI's while minimizing the cost. One of the early researchers to study this problem was George Stigler. He made an educated guess of the optimal solution to linear program using a heuristic method. His guess for the cost of an optimal diet was $39.93 per year (1939 prices). In the fall of 1947, Jack Laderman of the Mathematical Tables Project of the National Bureau of Standards undertook solving Stigler's model with the new simplex method. It was the first "large scale" computation in optimization. The linear program consisted of nine equation in 77 unknowns. It took nine clerks using hand-operated desk calculators 120 man days to solve for the optimal solution of $39.69. Stigler's guess for the optimal solution was off by only 24 cents per year.