David L. Applegate is an American computer scientist known for his research on the traveling salesperson problem.
[2] Applegate worked on the faculty at Rice University and at AT&T Labs before joining Google in New York City in 2016.
[1] His work on the Concorde TSP Solver, described in a 1998 paper, won the Beale–Orchard-Hays Prize of the Mathematical Optimization Society,[3][1][ICM] and his book The traveling salesman problem with the same authors won the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize in 2007.
[4][TSP] He and Edith Cohen won the IEEE Communications Society's William R. Bennett Prize for a 2006 research paper on robust network routing.
[1] With Guy Jacobsen and Daniel Sleator, Applegate was the first to computerize the analysis of the pencil-and-paper game, Sprouts.