Introduction to Linear Optimization (Athena Scientific Series in Optimization and Neural Computation, 6) (Athena Scientific Series in Optimization and Neural Computation, 6)

There are several minuses of the book. I find it a little wordy, although as I said earlier the writing is very good. Also, the authors try to include as much material as possible, which makes some parts a little superficial. On the other hand the broadness gives the reader a good overview of the field.

Overall, it's a great book for both studies and references.


One of the best books for introduction to OR   April 6, 2004
Kunal Kunde (New York NY)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

This is an excellent book -- it covers in far more detail the first 2/3rds of the 15.093J/2.098J course at MIT (as well as the more mathematically rigorous 15.081J/6.251J course).
The reader should definitely be a mathematically mature student but even the simplest portable concepts from a linear algebra 101 course (basis, rank of a matrix, linear independence) should suffice.
The authors cover the subject matter first in a geometric sense, but since algorithms are necessarily algebraic, they then present the very same concepts algebraically.
An excellent introductory chapter is followed by chapters on the geometry of LP, the simplex method, duality theory, sensitivity analysis, network flow problems, complexity theory, interior point methods, discrete optimization, IP methods (branch-and-bound, dynamic programming, cutting plane, simulated annealing etc.) and finally, to top it all off and to emphasize and present large, important, real-world problems: the art in linear optimization.
Professor Dimitris Bertsimas is an excellent teacher and he and Professor John Tsitsiklis have excelled themselves at this comprehensive (though, as they state themselves, not encyclopedic) effort.


excellent both as a textbook and reference book   July 3, 1997
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

Prof. Bertsimas and Tsitsiklis succeed in writing a book which is fun to read, without being trivial. It doesn't require much mathematical background (thus being accessible to advanced undergraduates), but present clearly and with sufficient depth relatively new developments like ellipsoid and interior point methods (on the other side, the simplex is given less emphasis than other, older books). Stochastic and integer programming are developed in separate chapters. Another very nice chapter is on "the art of LP". Overall, the book provides the reader with the tools necessary to read the literature in the field. The problems are very well chosen. Unfortunately, the bibliography is not aimed at being complete, but is at least up-to-date


Great.   December 12, 2002
hearstavenue (Berkeley, CA United States)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

I think this is an excellent book. The first five chapters develop rigorously the geometry and algebra of linear programming. I studied the book in the context of a class and read almost every word of it. I liked the authors' pace and style -- rigorous, but clear and illuminating. The latter chapters of the book were also good, in particular the integer programming formulations and methods chapters.


Nice intuition and good coverage   January 1, 2006
Jonathan Birge (Cambridge, MA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

The best part of this book is the first half, where the foundations of linear programming are presented in a clear yet relatively rigorous fashion, accompanied by numerous intuitive geometrical explanations of the abstract general concepts. This approach, supplementing mathematics with graphical insights, works extremely well for this topic.

The quality goes down somewhat, perhaps neccessarily, in the latter half of the book as topics are presented less carefully, and in a somewhat rushed manner in order to cover all of the material the authors decided to include. Given that the fundamentals are covered so well, perhaps this is a fair trade.

The only real negative I can think of is that it's a small crime for professors to create their own publishing companies (Athena only publishes works by a small group of MIT professors) and then still charge outrageous amounts for the books. This would be completely unacceptable were it not for the fact that, unlike most self-published work, this book's production quality is on par with that of the large publishers.