Rob Pratt has worked at SAS since 2000 and is a Senior Manager in the Scientific Computing department in the Analytics R&D division. He manages a team of developers responsible for the optimization modeling language and solvers for linear, mixed integer linear, quadratic, and conic optimization. He earned a B.S. in Mathematics (with a second major in English) from the University of Dayton and both an M.S. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In the traveling salesman problem (TSP), a salesman must minimize travel distance while visiting each of a given set of cities exactly once. Recently, the TSP has generated some buzz in the popular media, after a blog post by Randy Olson. The tour shown was not quite optimal, and Bill