Did you know that Chicago is the most important railroad center in North America? Chicago has more lines of track radiating in more directions than from any other city. The windy city has long been the most important interchange point for freight traffic between the nation’s major railroads and it is the hub of Amtrak, the intercity rail passenger system. You may not realize it, but railroad tracks and graph theory have a history together. Back in the mid 1950s the US Military had an interest in finding out how much capacity the Soviet railway network had to move cargo from the Western Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. This lead to the Maximum Flow problem and the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm to solve it.
Max De Marzi 