Kantorovich
Linear Programming was first introduced by Leonid Kantorovich in 1939. He developed the earliest linear programming problems that were used by the army during WWII in order to reduce the costs of the army and increase the efficiency in the battlefield. The method was a secret because of its use in war-time strategies, until 1947 when George B. Dantzig published the simplex method and John von Neuman developed the theory of duality. After WWII, many industries began adopting linear programming for its usefulness in planning optimization.
Dantzig
Dantzig's original linear programming example was to find the best assignment of 70 people to 70 jobs. In order to select the best assignment requires a lot of computing power; the number of possible configurations exceeds the number of particles in the observable universe. However, by posing the problem as a linear program and applying the simplex algorithm, it takes only a moment to find the optimum solution. The theory behind linear programming drastically reduces the number of possible optimal solutions that must be checked.