The Traveling Salesman Problem: From Icosian Games to NP-Hard Routing

Exploring one of math and CS' most enduring puzzles: what the Traveling Salesman Problem is, why it's so hard, and how clever algorithms yield near-optimal routes in the real world. We'll trace its 19th-century origin in Hamilton's Icosian Game, unpack NP-hardness, examine key variations (symmetric/asymmetric, metric/Euclidean), and spotlight famous approximation methods like Christofides–Serdyukov and their impact on logistics and optimization.

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