When You Assume a Solution is Possible
Story #16 of my 5,000-story project
George Dantzig was a mathematics doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. One day in 1939, he walked into his statistics class late.
He saw two math problems on the board as he entered the classroom. They looked like homework for the day. He jotted them down in his notebook.
When he went home that night, Dantzig found the problems more complicated than usual. After working on them for a few days, he went to the professor with his answers.
He apologized for taking so long and asked if the professor still wanted his submission.
“Just throw it on the desk.” the professor said.
Dantzig hesitated. He was concerned his homework would be mixed with the piles of papers on the professor’s desk, but he complied.
“I feared my homework would be lost there forever.” Dantzig later recounted.
Nothing happened for a while.
Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, the professor banged on Dantzig’s front door. He beamed with excitement.
“I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication,”
It took Dantzig a few minutes to make sense of what the professor said.
As it turned out, Dantzig solved two “unsolvable” open problems in statistical theory. The two prompts on the blackboard were meant to illustrate examples of unproven statistical theorems.
He didn’t assume a solution was out of reach.
“If I had known that the problems were not homework but were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics, I probably would not have thought positively, would have become discouraged, and would never have solved them.” — George Dantzig
Source: The Unsolvable Math Problem
