Technology Tips: Linear Programming with More Than Two Decision Variables

Abstract

In a 1999 article in Mathematics Teacher, we demonstrated how graphing systems of linear inequalities could be motivated using real-world linear programming problems (Edwards and Chelst 1999). At that time, the graphs were drawn by hand, and the corner-point principle was applied to find the optimal solution. However, that approach limits the number of decision variables to two, and problems with only two decision variables are often transparent and inauthentic.