12
$\begingroup$

G. A. Croes is the author of the first description of the 2-opt moves heuristic for improving non-optimal traveling salesman tours:

Croes, G. A. “A Method for Solving Traveling-Salesman Problems.” Operations Research, vol. 6, no. 6, 1958, pp. 791–812. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/167074

There is however a mystery about that article and author: after the submission of the article the author moved back to the Netherlands and the publisher didn't manage to contact the author to inform him about the review findings, so the publisher did some corrections on his own account and added a note about that in the published article.

enter image description here

It is not even known whether the author was/is aware of the publication.

given that the article was seminal regarding tour improvement heuristics, it seems unsatisfactory that nothing is known about the author even more because combinatorial optimization has an active research community in the Netherlands

Question:

what is known about what happened with G. A. Croes after he returned to the Netherlands, especially what are the reasons why he couldn't be contacted by, resp. didn't contact his publisher.

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
3
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ I did some digging. I can write a more complete answer soon (and I have some pending hooks out). Here are some things in the meantime: he (Goeff Croes) did his PhD at the University of Groningen in 1945, and worked at Shell between 1955 and 1978. He then moved to working as a software engineer in astronomy, eventually working at the DRAO in Canada. There he was part of designing the AIPS++ programming language. He retired in 1993. I don't yet know why he couldn't be contacted. $\endgroup$
    – Carl-Fredrik Nyberg Brodda
    Commented Nov 17 at 15:55
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Carl-FredrikNybergBrodda an answer with these details would be beneficial for the history of the TSP; knowing about the people behind the progress seems important in its own right. $\endgroup$
    – Manfred Weis
    Commented Nov 17 at 16:00
  • $\begingroup$ Should it be considered a mystery that he could not be contacted? I have seen an estimate of 7-14 days for letters to be delivered between the US and Europe in the 1950s. International phone calls existed but had to go through operators in both countries. It seems like a minor failure of coordination could make things very difficult. $\endgroup$
    – Neil Strickland
    Commented Nov 17 at 20:25

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.