OR Fun Facts | May 2026 Collection

This post brings together all of the ORSSA fun facts shared on LinkedIn during May 2026 in a single, convenient archive. Throughout the month, each post explored a fascinating OR concept, application, or insight, illustrating how Operations Research supports effective decision-making and problem-solving in a wide range of industries and real-world situations. Whether you're catching up on posts you may have missed or revisiting your favourites, this collection offers a concise overview of the diverse and impactful role that Operations Research plays in practice.

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Fun fact 1:

Did you know that adding more roads can actually make traffic worse?

This counterintuitive phenomenon in traffic and network flow is known as Braess's Paradox. In certain networks, when each driver selfishly chooses the fastest route, adding an extra road can lead to more congestion for everyone. Why? Because individual optimisation doesn't imply system optimisation. The best decision for each person isn’t always the best decision for the system.

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Fun fact 2:

Ever wondered where the word “algorithm” comes from?

The term traces back to the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name was later Latinised to Algoritmi, which eventually gave us the word algorithm.

Al-Khwarizmi’s work helped spread Hindu-Arabic numerals and systematic calculation methods throughout the medieval world, laying foundations for modern mathematics, computer science, and optimisation.

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Fun fact 3:

In 1972, Richard Karp published a paper that fundamentally changed how we think about hard optimisation problems.

Building on earlier work by Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin, Karp showed that 21 different problems were all NP-complete. In other words, if we could find an efficient algorithm for any one of them, we could efficiently solve all of them.

What made this especially striking for operations researchers was the list itself: among them was set covering, 0-1 integer programming, knapsack problems and job sequencing. Even the Hamiltonian cycle problem, closely related to the travelling salesman problem, was there. Many of the hardest problems in logistics, routing, and scheduling seemed to share a common computational hardness, beyond just being difficult to solve in their own right.

More than 50 years later, we still haven’t found an efficient algorithm for any NP-complete problem.

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Fun fact 4:

In 1994, John Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics for work that became foundational to game theory and operations research.

His key idea, the Nash equilibrium, describes a situation where no player can improve their outcome by changing strategy alone, assuming everyone else keeps theirs unchanged.

This matters enormously in OR because many real-world systems don’t have a single decision-maker. Traffic networks, supply chains, auctions, and competitive markets all involve multiple agents pursuing their own conflicting objectives.