The origins of the travelling salesman problem are unclear. A handbook for travelling salesmen from 1832 mentions the problem and includes example tours through Germany and Switzerland, but contains no mathematical treatment.


William Rowan Hamilton
The TSP was mathematically formulated in the 19th century by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and by the British mathematician Thomas Kirkman. Hamilton's icosian game was a recreational puzzle based on finding a Hamiltonian cycle. The general form of the TSP appears to have been first studied by mathematicians during the 1930s in Vienna and at Harvard, notably by Karl Menger, who defines the problem, considers the obvious brute-force algorithm, and observes the non-optimality of the nearest neighbour heuristic:

We denote by messenger problem (since in practice this question should be solved by each postman, anyway also by many travelers) the task to find, for finitely many points whose pairwise distances are known, the shortest route connecting the points. Of course, this problem is solvable by finitely many trials. Rules which would push the number of trials below the number of permutations of the given points, are not known. The rule that one first should go from the starting point to the closest point, then to the point closest to this, etc., in general does not yield the shortest route.

It was first considered mathematically in the 1930s by Merrill M. Flood who was looking to solve a school bus routing problem. Hassler Whitney at Princeton University generated interest in the problem, which he called the "48 states problem". The earliest publication using the phrase "travelling salesman problem" was the 1949 RAND Corporation report by Julia Robinson, "On the Hamiltonian game (a traveling salesman problem)."

In the 1950s and 1960s, the problem became increasingly popular in scientific circles in Europe and the United States after the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica offered prizes for steps in solving the problem. Notable contributions were made by George Dantzig, Delbert Ray Fulkerson and Selmer M. Johnson from the RAND Corporation, who expressed the problem as an integer linear program and developed the cutting plane method for its solution. They wrote what is considered the seminal paper on the subject in which with these new methods they solved an instance with 49 cities to optimality by constructing a tour and proving that no other tour could be shorter. Dantzig, Fulkerson and Johnson, however, speculated that given a near optimal solution we may be able to find optimality or prove optimality by adding a small number of extra inequalities (cuts). They used this idea to solve their initial 49 city problem using a string model. They found they only needed 26 cuts to come to a solution for their 49 city problem. While this paper did not give an algorithmic approach to TSP problems, the ideas that lay within it were indispensable to later creating exact solution methods for the TSP, though it would take 15 years to find an algorithmic approach in creating these cuts. As well as cutting plane methods, Dantzig, Fulkerson and Johnson used branch and bound algorithms perhaps for the first time.

In 1959, Jillian Beardwood, J.H. Halton and John Hammersley published an article entitled "The Shortest Path Through Many Points" in the journal of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The Beardwood–Halton–Hammersley 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.

In the following decades, the problem was studied by many researchers from mathematics, computer science, chemistry, physics, and other sciences. In the 1960s, however, a new approach was created, that instead of seeking optimal solutions would produce a solution whose length is provably bounded by a multiple of the optimal length, and in doing so would create lower bounds for the problem; these lower bounds would then be used with branch and bound approaches. One method of doing this was to create a minimum spanning tree of the graph and then double all its edges, which produces the bound that the length of an optimal tour is at most twice the weight of a minimum spanning tree.

In 1976, Christofides and Serdyukov independently of each other made a big advance in this direction: the Christofides-Serdyukov algorithm yields a solution that, in the worst case, is at most 1.5 times longer than the optimal solution. As the algorithm was simple and quick, many hoped it would give way to a near optimal solution method. However, this hope for improvement did not immediately materialize, and Christofides-Serdyukov remained the method with the best worst-case scenario until 2011, when a (very) slightly improved approximation algorithm was developed for the subset of "graphical" TSPs. In 2020 this tiny improvement was extended to the full (metric) TSP.

Richard M. Karp showed in 1972 that the Hamiltonian cycle problem was NP-complete, which implies the NP-hardness of TSP. This supplied a mathematical explanation for the apparent computational difficulty of finding optimal tours.

Great progress was made in the late 1970s and 1980, when Grötschel, Padberg, Rinaldi and others managed to exactly solve instances with up to 2,392 cities, using cutting planes and branch and bound.

In the 1990s, Applegate, Bixby, Chvátal, and Cook developed the program Concorde that has been used in many recent record solutions. Gerhard Reinelt published the TSPLIB in 1991, a collection of benchmark instances of varying difficulty, which has been used by many research groups for comparing results. In 2006, Cook and others computed an optimal tour through an 85,900-city instance given by a microchip layout problem, currently the largest solved TSPLIB instance. For many other instances with millions of cities, solutions can be found that are guaranteed to be within 2–3% of an optimal tour.
What is the history of the travelling salesman problem throughout the years in a short bulleted list?
* 19th century - mathematically formulated for first time by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and by the British mathematician Thomas Kirkman
* 1930s - First studied by mathematicians in Vienna and at Harvard, most notably by Karl Menger and Merill M. Flood who was looking to solve a school bus routing problem.
* 1959 - Jillian Beardwood, J.H. Halton and John Hammersley published an article entitled "The Shortest Path Through Many Points" in the journal of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which provided the first practical solution.
* 1960s - new approach is created, which produce a solution whose length is provably bounded by a multiple of the optimal length.
* 1972 - Richard M. Karp showed that the Hamiltonian cycle problem was NP-complete, which implies the NP-hardness of traveling salesman problem.
* 1976 - Christofides and Serdyukov independently invented new algorithm, which yields a solution that in the worst case is at most 1.5 times longer than the optimal solution.
* 1990s -  Applegate, Bixby, Chvátal, and Cook developed the program Concorde that has been used in many recent record solutions.
* 1991 - Gerhard Reinelt published the TSPLIB, a collection of benchmark instances of varying difficulty, which has been used by many research groups for comparing results
* 2006 - Cook and others computed an optimal tour through an 85,900-city instance given by a microchip layout problem, currently the largest solved TSPLIB instance.
* 2011 - Slightly improved approximation algorithm is developed for the subset of "graphical" traveling salesman problem.
* 2020 - The slightly improved approximation algorithm developed for the subset of "graphical" is extended to cover the full traveling salesman problem.