A contextualized historical analysis of the Kuhn-Tucker theorem in nonlinear programming: The impact of World War II

When Kuhn and Tucker proved the Kuhn-Tucker theorem in 1950 they launched the theory of nonlinear programming. However, in a sense this theorem had been proven already: In 1939 by W. Karush in a master's thesis, which was unpublished; in 1948 by F. John in a paper that was at first rejected by the Duke Mathematical Journal; and possibly earlier by Ostrogradsky and Farkas. The questions of whether the Kuhn-Tucker theorem can be seen as a multiple discovery and why the different occurences of the theorem were so differently received by the mathematical communities are discussed on the basis of a contextualized historical analysis of these works. The significance of the contexts both mathematically and socially for these questions is discussed, including the role played by the military in the shape of Office of Naval Research (ONR) and operations research (OR). (C) 2000 Academic Press MSC 1991 subject classification: 01A60; 49-03; 52-03; 90-03; 90C30.