Time and date: 11 June 2025 at 2:00 pm | Location: Abacws 3.38 | Speaker: Matthew Howells
When Taylor Swift released her seventh studio album, Lover, she introduced us to a Tennessee girl’s journey to London to see her beloved in the song London Boy. The lyrics mention several locations across the city - but visiting them in the order they are sung in the song makes for quite an impractical journey and hardly The Best Day. What if we wanted to make this trip as efficient as possible? Fortunately, we can use operational research to help us solve this. This talk introduces the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), a classic routing problem in operational research, and how it can be solved to find the shortest path around a set of destinations. By doing so, we can solve the Tennessee girl’s London Love Story to optimality within Python. Along the way, I will look at broader applications of the TSP, and how this kind of problem can benefit academics, industry professionals, and maybe even the world’s most famous popstar.
