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  • 1996-12-03 (xsd:date)
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  • The Legend of the 'Unsolvable Math Problem' (en)
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  • A legend about the unsolvable math problem combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other scholar in his field of study — with a positive thinking motif that turns up in other urban legends: when people are free to pursue goals unfettered by presumed limitations on what they can accomplish, they just may manage some extraordinary feats through the combined application of native talent and hard work: And this particular version is all the more interesting for being based on a real-life incident! One day in 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of unsolved statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them. (The equations Dantzig tackled are more accurately described not as unsolvable problems, but rather as unproven statistical theorems for which he worked out proofs.) Six weeks later, Dantzig's statistics professor notified him that he had prepared one of his two homework proofs for publication, and Dantzig was given co-author credit on a second paper several years later when another mathematician independently worked out the same solution to the second problem. George Dantzig recounted his feat in a 1986 interview for the College Mathematics Journal: Dr. Dantzig also explained how his story passed into the realm of urban legendry: The version of Dantzig's story published by Christian televangelist Robert Schuller contained a good deal of embellishment and misinformation which has since been propagated in urban legend-like forms of the tale such as the one quoted at the head of this page: Schuller converted the mistaken homework assignment into a final exam with ten problems (eight of which were real and two of which were unsolvable), claimed that even Einstein was unable to unlock the secrets of the two extra problems, and erroneously stated that Dantzig's professor was so impressed that he gave Dantzig a job as his assistant, and Dantzig has been at Stanford ever since. George Dantzig (himself the son of a mathematician) received a Bachelor's degree from University of Maryland in 1936 and a Master's from the University of Michigan in 1937 before completing his Doctorate (interrupted by World War II) at UC Berkeley in 1946. He later worked for the Air Force, took a position with the RAND Corporation as a research mathematician in 1952, became professor of operations research at Berkeley in 1960, and joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1966, where he taught and published as a professor of operations research until the 1990s. In 1975, Dr. Dantzig was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Gerald Ford. George Dantzig passed away at his Stanford home at age 90 on 13 May 2005. Sightings: This legend is used as the setup of the plot in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. As well, one of the early scenes in the 1999 film Rushmore shows the main character daydreaming about solving the impossible question and winning approbation from all. (en)
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