Gaspard Monge

Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) was a French mathematician who posed the problem of optimal transport in 1781: given two distributions of mass, find the most efficient way to move one into the other. His formulation — seeking a deterministic transport map that minimizes total cost — became known as the Monge problem. Though the problem remained unsolved in full generality for over a century and a half, Monge's question established the conceptual framework that Leonid Kantorovich would later reformulate using linear programming. Today, Monge's original formulation is recognized as the deterministic limit of the Kantorovich relaxation, and the two perspectives together form the foundation of optimal transport theory.