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It was just another college day for George Dantzig. Known for burning the midnight oil, George’s dedication often saw him studying well into the night. That fateful day, his diligence backfired a tad; he overslept, rushing into his class 20 minutes late. Spotting two math problems on the board, George hastily scribbled them down, mistaking them for that day’s homework.
Days went by, with George wrestling and wrangling with these problems. Then came the ‘eureka’ moment. Proudly, he placed his solutions on the professor’s desk the next day, not nothing much of it.
That was, until an early Sunday morning when an ecstatic professor jolted George awake. In his tardiness, George had missed a vital piece of information: those two problems were unsolved mathematical teasers. They were equations so perplexing that even the genius of Einstein had been stumped. Yet, George Dantzig, unaware of their reputation, had cracked them both.
In his words, “If I had known that the problems were not homework but were two famous unsolved problems in statistics, I probably would not have thought positively, would have become discouraged, and would never have solved them.” This revelation tells us something profound about human potential and the barriers we self-impose.
