He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father was a travelling salesman and his mother a dressmaker who taught him to sew.

ECONOMIST: Bill Blass

Some nights, especially when gauchos from out of town or some disoriented travelling salesman turned up, Pereda felt a powerful desire to start a fight.

NEWYORKER: The Insufferable Gaucho

Tackling a Travelling Salesman Problem that has lots of locations with a supercomputer can take years because even the most powerful supercomputers use only a few thousand processors.

BBC: Processing power of single cells

James Stewart plays a temporarily wheelchair-bound photojournalist who uses his camera as a telescope to spy on his neighbors, including a travelling salesman (Raymond Burr) who may have killed his invalid wife.

NEWYORKER: Rear Window

The field of DNA computing was kicked off in 1994 when Leonard Adleman used strands of DNA to solve a simple example of a mathematical conundrum known as the Travelling Salesman Problem.

BBC: Processing power of single cells