 Operators and are sometimes also written as and , and stand for "argument of the minimum" and "argument of the maximum".Fermat and Lagrange found calculus-based formulae for identifying optima, while Newton and Gauss proposed iterative methods for moving towards an optimum.The term "linear programming" for certain optimization cases was due to George B. Dantzig, although much of the theory had been introduced by Leonid Kantorovich in 1939.