Saturday, March 7, 2009

Unsolvable

"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 "unsolvable" statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them....

Six weeks later, Dantzig's statistic professor notified him that he had prepared one of his two "homework" proofs for publication, and Dantzig was given co-author credit on another paper several years later when another mathematician independently worked out the same solution to the second problem."




"... 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."

[Source]

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