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Mooie anekdote


In Geschiedenis, door Jeanine

Op Futility Closet vond ik deze anekdote:

One day in 1939, Berkeley doctoral candidate George Dantzig arrived late for a statistics class taught by Jerzy Neyman. He copied down the two problems on the blackboard and turned them in a few days later, apologizing for the delay — he’d found them unusually difficult. Distracted, Neyman told him to leave his homework on the desk.

On a Sunday morning six weeks later, Neyman banged on Dantzig’s door. The problems that Dantzig had assumed were homework were actually unproved statistical theorems that Neyman had been discussing with the class — and Dantzig had proved both of them. Both were eventually published, with Dantzig as coauthor.

“When I began to worry about a thesis topic,” he recalled later, “Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

Ongelooflijk. George Dantzig (1914 - 2005) heeft het simplexalgoritme ontwikkeld en was een pionier in lineair programmeren. Bovenstaande anekdote schijnt een inspiratiebron voor Good Will Hunting te zijn geweest.