Definition of "optimal" []

• Most favorable or desirable; optimum. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "This poses serious problems for the claim of engineers that their designs are optimal solutions, since Arrow's theorem implies that in a multi-criteria problem the notion of ˜optimal™ cannot be rigorously defined."
• "One suspects that the term optimal came into widespread use among economists as a marketing device to promote their normative propositions based on efficiency."
• "In order to achieve what I call "optimal stress," you must realize that stress is a process, not an event."