Invited Note---Some References for the Ellipsoid Algorithm

From personal interest and also on behalf of the Mathematical Programming Society I have been trying to keep afloat in the flood of writing that followed Khachian's "Polynomial Time Algorithm for Linear Programming" (Khachian, L. G. 1979. A polynomial algorithm in linear programming. Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR 244 (5) 1093--1096; 1979. Soviet Math. Dokl. 20 191--194.)---or, more precisely, that followed the article "A Soviet discovery rocks world of mathematics" on the front page of the New York Times for November 7, 1979; 41 of the 44 post-Khachian papers I have seen are dated November, 1979 or later. (They are listed and briefly annotated in the bibliography (Wolfe, P. 1980. A bibliography for the ellipsoid algorithm. (29 April) 6.), along with relevant background items and some 30 press reports, etc.) The present note, portions of which are taken from an article to appear in the first issue of Optima, Newsletter of the Mathematical Programming Society, points to a few items of this considerably overlapping literature which may be of use to the curious reader.