A brief history of optimal transportation (Jules Candau-Tilh)

In 1781, the French mathematician Gaspard Monge introduced the concept of optimal transport in his famous "Mémoire sur la théorie des déblais et des remblais". However, after an initial enthusiasm, the theory remained in a somewhat dormant state during the 19th century. It was not until the groundbreaking advancements of Leonid Kantorovtich in the 1940s that optimal transport earned a central position in non-linear and geometric analysis. Nowadays, it remains a vivid theory, with applications in the field of isoperimetric problems, linear programming as well as image processing.