Optimization is a vast area of research and its applications are spread over many different fields of social and natural sciences including economics, business, physics, chemistry, astronomy, computer science and engineering, life science, medical science etc. It is not a surprise that researchers from all these and many others areas have contributed in techniques of optimization. Optimization have been used to find "shortest-path","minimum-energy","minimum cost, maximum profit", "least informative image" etc. Optimization is not new and great mathematicians like Fermat, Lagrange, Newton and Gauss also contributed in it. In particular, calculus based techniques of Fermat and Lagrange and iterative methods of Newton and Gauss are still very much in use.
There are many interesting problems in optimization, like the famous travelling salesman problem: finding out the order in which a salesman should visit a group of cities (with location given) so that that the distance he travels is minimum. In fact a computer engineer must also solve the same problem when drawing the circuit diagram for a chip with the location of different components given.