Abstract
Oblivious routing is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization and a key primitive that has been used to speed up the running times for various problems ranging from maximum flow, to multicommodity flow, to minimum cost flow. In this talk I will survey some of Michael's beautiful work in this area. In general, Michael's results had a tendency to simplify previous approaches and strike at the heart what made problems solvable. His work on oblivious routing was no exception; it was the first project I ever discussed with him and it changed how I thought about problems in this area.