We are pleased to share an exciting public lecture as part of the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Korean Mathematical Society (KMS), featuring one of the world’s leading researchers in combinatorial optimization. This event is sponsored by the IBS Discrete Mathematics Group.
🧭 The Traveling Salesman Problem: Package Deliveries, Pub Walks, and Astro Tours
👤 Speaker: William Cook
🏛 Affiliation: Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo
📅 Date: October 22, 2025 (Wednesday), 7:00 PM
📍 Venue: ST Center, Seoul (near Gangnam Station)
한국과학기술회관 B1, 과학기술컨벤션센터, 대회의실 2 (강남역 인근)
🗣 Language: English
🎟 Admission: Free of charge
🌍 About the Talk
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) asks a deceptively simple question:
What is the shortest possible route that visits a set of locations exactly once and returns to the starting point?
Despite its simplicity, the TSP is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and theoretical computer science, long considered difficult due to its computational complexity.
In this public lecture, William Cook, a leading authority on the TSP, will discuss:
- Modern algorithmic techniques capable of solving TSP instances with tens of thousands of stops
- Applications from package delivery to pub crawls and even space tours
- Real-world case studies, including optimization over 80,000 pubs in Korea and routes through over 100 million stars
The TSP remains a central example in complexity theory, showing how sustained mathematical effort can solve problems once deemed impossible.
👨🏫 About the Speaker
William Cook is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo and an internationally recognized expert on combinatorial optimization.
He is the author of the acclaimed book In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman and has contributed extensively to both the theory and computation of hard optimization problems.
🔗 Join Us!
Whether you’re a student interested in algorithms, a researcher in discrete mathematics, or simply curious about how math solves real-world problems — this is a lecture not to be missed.
📍 Location: ST Center, Seoul
🕖 Time: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, October 22, 2025
🎟 Admission: Free | 🗣 Language: English
🔗 More info about KMS 2025 Annual Meeting
📧 For inquiries: contact@kms.or.kr