Reviews for An Optimization Primer

The average rating for An Optimization Primer based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-03-11 00:00:00 Lisa Dunka Short, readable. The notation is somewhat anachronistic - no one in the matching literature denotes men and women by upper and lowercase letters anymore, ditto for the preference relations. Knuth proposes some interesting open problems at the end of the book. It would be interesting to see an updated version outlining progress on those problems (I know for example that Roth showed that there are "random paths to stability"). The most interesting result in this book is the lattice structure of stable matchings - interestingly, this was actually devised by John Conway (a hero to many of us who sadly passed away from COVID-19). All in all a great primer of the more combinatorics aspects of the stable marriage problem by the father of algorithmic analysis. Although, for someone interested in learning the important "classical" results in matching, I would strongly recommend Roth and Sotomayor's "two sided matching".

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-02 00:00:00 stephen whiteside An absolutely essential book for representation theory. Well translated etc, the only thing I would say is a fair few of the proofs are needlessly complicated. For instance, I remember early on a proof where we have to prove something for all finite dimensional vector spaces, which one would naturally do by induction starting from a line and working upwards. However, Serre insists on this very obtuse proof in strong induction, starting from the 0 vector space? Very weird.