Abstract

In the decades following the world war-II there has been a tremendous development of various powerful tools in optimization theory. Apart from the well known Linear Programming, ideas relating to nonlinear programming and nondifferentiable or nonsmooth optimization made wide strides. Convexity appeared to be the indespensible tool in studying most optimization problems. In this talk we discuss in brief about their developements and an attempt to break the restriction of convexity by using more general approaches which has given a whole new way to approach optimization theory and give new meaning to the most well known term in optimization-the Lagrangian Multipliers