“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

The movie “Good Will Hunting” has a scene that is inspired by the life of George Dantzig, the inventor of the simplex algorithm who introduced the world to the power of optimization. In the movie, Matt Damon plays an MIT janitor who anonymously solves a difficult math problem that a math professor posted on a hallway blackboard. In real life, George Dantzig was studying statistics under professor Jerzy Neyman at UC Berkeley. Here is how Dantzig described it: “I arrived late one day at one of Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework — the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual.” Read more here.