If you're not terribly concerned about speed, I would try to understand a bit of optimization in general instead of linear programming (which is a special case).
I should probably do that sometime in my life, if not for this.
Any suggestions for how? Would the wikipedia page be enough?
I'm going to be competing in the Moody's Mega Math Challenge, and I was wondering if there was anything in particular I should brush up on.
If you look at previous problems, you can see that they're pretty varied. I want to know if there's any widely applicable math that we could study (in a fairly short amount of time) to maximize the odds of us knowing something useful for the competition.
Our math backgrounds include:
Currently we're looking into Causality by Judea Pearl, and Linear Programming. Should we look at these? Anything else we should know?
Edit:
I suppose we could also use a genetic algorithm, but those don't seem particularly suited to the competition.