George Dantzig: How Being Late Helped Solve the Unsolvable

Do you know that nasty, sticky feeling? You burst into an empty hallway, trying to breathe intermittently. The auditorium door creaks treacherously loudly. Dozens of eyes turn towards you. The teacher makes a theatrical pause, stops in mid-sentence. This is exactly how, panting, sweating and mentally cursing the unset alarm clock, in 1939 a young man named George Dantzig entered the history of world science. Simply because he overslept.

George was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Smart, inquisitive, but that morning - catastrophically unpunctual. He was late for a statistics lecture given by Jerzy Neyman - a monumental and strict figure in mathematical circles. Slipping into his seat, Dantzig glanced at the board. There were two equations written in chalk.

The logic of a late student works straightforwardly. Equations on the board? So this is homework. George hastily copied them into a notebook, trying not to attract the professor's attention, and after the lecture he quietly went home.

And then the most interesting thing began. What psychologists today would call the triumph of cognitive naivety.

At home, sitting at his creaky table and pouring cheap black coffee, Dantzig got down to "homework." And then things stalled. Later, he recalled this moment with disarming modesty: "The tasks seemed a little more difficult than usual."

A little more difficult. An amazing formulation.

George gnawed his pencil. Crumpled paper. He was angry at himself for being stupid. He spent several days untangling this mathematical tangle. It never occurred to him to give it up - after all, the professor is waiting for a solution. It's just homework. Difficult, exhausting, but solvable. And he solved it. He brought the sheets with calculations to Neyman's office, apologized for the delay (again - he apologized!) and put them on the professor's desk, which was littered with books.

Neyman nodded absently and told him to leave the papers. George left, confident that his scribbles would remain gathering dust in this paper mountain.

Early Sunday morning. Six in the morning, to be exact. A time when in the student campus only those who have not yet gone to bed are awake. Dantzig's door began to be pounded on as if a fire had started.

Professor Neyman stood on the doorstep. With disheveled hair, holding the very same sheets of paper in his hands, he excitedly waved them in front of the sleepy graduate student's nose.

— I wrote an introduction to your work! — Neyman shouted. — Read it so I can send it out for publication right now!

George didn't understand anything. What publication? What introduction? These are just two problems from the textbook.

And then the truth came out. The equations on the board were not homework. These were two famous, previously unsolved problems in statistics. Problems that the best minds on the planet had been struggling with for decades. It was believed that they could not be proven. And a 25-year-old guy, not knowing the context, took and cracked them in a couple of days. Because no one had time to whisper in his ear: "Hey, dude, don't even try. It's impossible."

I often think about this story when I encounter another "dead end" in life. We live in a world where there are too many experts. As soon as you mention a new idea, there will immediately be a dozen people who will prove to you with graphs in their hands why it won't work.

"The market is oversaturated." "You don't have the right education." "Languages are no longer learned at this age." We become overgrown with these attitudes, like the bottom of a ship with barnacles. They slow us down long before we even try to move.

George Dantzig bypassed this trap by pure chance. His mind was clear of other people's expectations. He did not experience sacred awe before an unsolvable problem. He only had a problem and the tools to solve it. No piety. No fear.

A year later, when it was time to write his doctoral dissertation, Dantzig came to Neyman and asked what topic he should choose. The professor laughed, waved his hand and said: "Just sew together those two sheets of homework. That will be more than enough."

And he was right. Later, Dantzig became one of the founders of linear programming - a discipline that changed economics, logistics and computer science. We essentially use his algorithms every time we order food delivery or plot a route in the navigator.

There is no morality in this story about being late for classes. Rather, it is a reminder of how often we become hostages of other people's experiences. Sometimes our ignorance is the most powerful armor.

The next time you find yourself faced with a task that seems daunting, overwhelming, and, as smart people say, "impossible" - remember that breathless student in Berkeley. Take a deep breath. Imagine it's just ordinary homework. And try to solve it.