After World War II, Berlin was an "island" surrounded by the Soviet -dominated East Germany, and Berlin was also partitioned into West and East Berlin. In 1948, the Soviets tried to force American, British and French forces out of Berlin by blockading land routes to the sectors each of these powers occupied. This Berlin Blockade was thwarted (until its abandonment in Sept., 1949) by a massive airlitt of food, fuel, and other supplies needed by Berliners. The success of this airlift, with a limited number of aircraft, was primarily due to careful planning using a mathematical tool, linear programming, finding solutions to its problems by means of a simplex algorithm developed by an American mathematician, George Dantzig.

The mathematical purpose of linear programming is to find a subset of numbers from a prescribed set of numbers which MAXIMIZES or MINIMIZES a given polynomial (algebraic) form. A representative case is known as "The Diet Problem": how to prescribe a diet which will MAXIMIZE NOURISHMENT while MINIMIZING COST. In the Berlin Blockade case, a giant flight plan should MAXIMIZE THE SUPPLY LOAD FLOWN while MINIMIZING the aircraft and personnel involved. Typically, constraints on the problem are formulated as a set of polynomial inequalities, which graph as a sector in an n-dimensional region, where n is the number of constraints. Dantzig's simplex algorithm iteratively "whittles" the relationship down to a solution.

After the success of Dantzig's work became known to the mathematical world and some of the general public, it became known that a Soviet mathematician, x y, has earlier obtained these results. But y's math was ignored, after being criticized, because it seemed in conflict with Marxist dogma.

As in the Leontief case, math was used with success. And, again, the lack of publicity for such methods left the public ignorant that math was of any political use, and students were left without support.