Jillian Beardwood

Jillian Beardwood (20 December 1934–28 October 2019) was a British mathematician known for the Beardwood-Halton-Hammersley Theorem. Published by the Cambridge Philosophical Society in a 1959 article entitled "The Shortest Path Through Many Points", the theorem provides a practical solution to the "travelling salesman problem". The authors derived an asymptotic formula to determine the length of the shortest route for a salesman who starts at a home or office and visits a fixed number of locations before returning to the start.