There are currently several questions tagged mathematical-programming, but this doesn't convey much meaning to me. Are there better tags we could use?
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I'm not even sure what the tag says in the first place. Any hints? (Or is it the obvious, "Mathematica is used to solve mathematical programs with a computer"? In that case, it should simply be called programming I guess.) – David Jan 18 '12 at 5:11
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1When I first saw the tag, I thought of the disciplines of linear programming, dynamic programming, and integer programming, that are all about optimization. But I was mistaken, maybe we could split this tag into "mathematics" and "programming"? – tlehman Jan 18 '12 at 5:47
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@Tobi: Not sure that you were the one that was mistaken. I think the phrase is just unfamiliar to people, so they incorrectly used it. – Simon Jan 18 '12 at 8:29
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A bit of googling shows that Wikipedia (accessed via google cache because of the SOPA protest) says that its an old term for programming optimization problems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_optimization
An optimization problem can be represented in the following way << snip >>.
Such a formulation is called an optimization problem or a mathematical programming problem
(a term not directly related to computer programming, but still in use for example in linear programming - see History below).
The page http://glossary.computing.society.informs.org/index.php?page=nature.html says that
A mathematical program is an optimization problem of the form:
Maximize $f(x): x in X, g(x) <= 0, h(x) = 0$
where $X$ is a subset of $R^n$ and is in the domain of the functions, $f$, $g$ and $h$, which map into real spaces. The relations, $x$ in $X$, $g(x) <= 0$ and $h(x) = 0$ are called constraints, and $f$ is called the objective function.
So, mathematical-programming is just a certain type of constrained optimization problem. From this point of view, all questions so far tagged with it are tagged incorrectly.
We could make mathematical-programming a synonym for optimization, however, the optimization tag might get confused with performance-tuning...
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3It's for this reason I was advocating not using the optimization tag. The concept of mathematical optimization should use mathematical-optimization, and anything involving program optimization should be tagged performance-tuning. I don't really understand why mathematical-programming was used. I think people used it for tagging things that were related to mathematical formulas in a programming context. – Mike Bailey Jan 18 '12 at 9:28
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