further reading…

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023), by Siddharth Kara

Cobalt (2022), Charlie Angus

ALGORITHM

During the 9th century, there was a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khowarizmi who enjoyed formally describing the step-by-step procedures he used to complete arithmetic operations. The word "algorithm" is derived from a Latin translation of his last name, and his work helped to found computer science as we know it today.

More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (2023), by Meredith Broussard

Algorithms of Oppression (2018), by Safiya Umoja Noble

Simplex algorithm

Originally developed by George Dantzig during WWII, the Simplex algorithm maximizes the result of a linear objective function given a set of constraints.

This is one of my favourite algorithms. I learned it through the Math 209: Finite Mathematics course offered from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Athabasca University. The textbook we used is, “Finite Mathematics“ by Raymond A. Barnett, Michael R. Ziegler, Karl Byleen. This textbook may be a little old but the nice thing about algorithms is that they tend not to change much over time. Alternatively, there’s Wikipedia.