I often use real-world examples to explain to my middle school math students why some of the more arcane things we do have applications. This video is really terrific and even my six graders understood it. They always ask what they’re ever going to do with some of the math subjects we cover, and now I can show them something practical.
The traveling salesman problem allows us to find the shortest or the longest path used to travel to all the given areas once and return to the starting point. There are various methods used to find this out. There is no perfect solution but an optimal solution can be selected and implemented.
This is amazing video! Lots of you tubers just start teaching the logic and solving the problem without stating the usage of the problem by relating it to real life scenarios.
I’d like to know more about this and how various methods work, but the highest math I’ve taken is college calculus (and that was 10ish years ago) and most of the material I’ve found seems way over my head, like I’m missing several years of college courses and all the terminology that would come with it.