St. Botwulf
Botwulf was an English abbot at a time when clergymen offered services that went far beyond the spiritual: farmers who were experiencing problems with their crops would visit his monastery at Ikanhoe in Suffolk seeking a blessing. It turns out that the abbot had a great head for agriculture, and his practical guidance turned many a farmer's fortunes around. Before long, he started traveling to more and more far-flung domains to give advice, and his ministry evolved into something like a seventh-century consulting business.
Botwulf's services were so much in demand that the logistics of efficiently traveling from place to place taxed his genius at least as much as aiding farmers did. In particular, he devoted a great deal of effort to deciding, given a roster of clients' farms and the distances between them, what would be shortest path to stop at each farm and still return to Ikanhoe. Thus, it is recognized that Botwulf was the first to formulate the computationally hard traveling salesman problem, and, even more tantalizingly, surviving fragments of his journals imply that he had a rather ingenious method for computing a solution. While the algorithms are lost and Botwulf is recognized as a patron of both farmers and travelers, scholars of Ecclesiastical Combinatorics have debated their nature ever since.
A breakthrough in solving the mystery appears to have happened in 1992, when archaeologists excavated a part of Botwulf's chambers, finding small clay models that appear to represent the landscape of East Anglia. Further analysis revealed that specific paths on the models had been heavily populated with ants, meaning that Botwulf had effectively used an ant farm to simulate the optimal paths between farms; this was an implementation of the so-called ant colony optimization algorithm, thirteen centuries ahead of its time.
