How a Student's Late Homework Led to a Historic Math Breakthrough 📚

This student handed in his homework late, but instead of being punished, he ended up rewriting history.

George Dantzig was late for his grad stats class one day and rushed into the classroom without talking to anyone. As he sat down, he noticed two problems written on the blackboard and assumed they had been assigned as homework. So he copied them down and went back to his room.

But when he started working on them, he realized they weren’t typical math problems and that he would need a bit more time to solve them. So when George submitted his assignment late, he apologized to his professor, explaining that the questions had seemed a little harder than usual.

But six weeks later, he was surprised by his professor banging on his door, looking both shaken and excited. It turned out that the problems George had copied from the blackboard weren’t homework at all, they were actually two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics, and George had just cracked them.

George Dantzig's life later inspired the movie "Good Will Hunting", and his work transformed the fields of economics, engineering, and computer science.


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Stanford:
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/05/george-b-dantzig-operations-research-professor-dies-90

Did You Know?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pROU_jy3BPQ

The Herald:
https://www.herald.co.zw/fresh-thinking-fresh-possibilities/

Berkeley:
https://engineering.berkeley.edu/george-dantzig-operations-research-phenom/#:~:text=Arriving%20late%20to%20a%20statistics,two%20famously%20unsolved%20statistics%20problems.

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