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History

An account of the discovery of the theorem was given by Ford and Fulkerson in 1962:

"Determining a maximal steady state flow from one point to another in a network subject to capacity limitations on arcs... was posed to the authors in the spring of 1955 by T.E. Harris, who, in conjunction with General F. S. Ross (Ret.) had formulated a simplified model of railway traffic flow, and pinpointed this particular problem as the central one suggested by the model. It was not long after this until the main result, Theorem 5.1, which we call the max-flow min-cut theorem, was conjectured and established. A number of proofs have since appeared."