On June 20-24, 1949, Tjalling Koopmans (1975 Nobel laureate in economics) organized what is now known as the Zero^th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming. 

ISMP 2009 in Chicago will mark the 60th anniversary of this first conference on “linear programming” held at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.   A special program will commemorate that event and Chicago’s role in the early development of the field.

The Zero^th Meeting included economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and managers with a focus on the fundamental question of how best to allocate limited resources to meet desired goals.  Participants included five future recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics and six future recipients of the John von Neumann Theory Prize in operations research and management sciences.  A complete list of attendees appears here.

Papers given at the Zero^th ISMP (see the Proceedings) covered analysis of the mathematical models to describe optimal resource allocations, the mathematical tools to discover those allocations, and various application areas that could benefit from research in the field. This tradition of theory, computation, and application of mathematical programming continues in ISMP 2009.  The meeting will highlight the state-of-the-art in optimization methodology, potential future advances in the field, and applications across all domains.