J. Mark Powell
Submitted photo
By J. Mark Powell
Always be on time, we are taught. Promptness is, after all, a virtue. But one time, being late paid off spectacularly for one tardy student. And we are all the better today for it. Here’s how it happened.
George Dantzig was a math whiz. We’re talking scary smart with numbers. Growing up as a kid in the 1920s, long before personal calculators were ever dreamed up, he figured out difficult problems the old-fashioned way with pencil, paper and brainpower.
Dantzig was born into a family of Jewish academics. (His parents met as college students at the University of Paris. His dad went on to become a mathematician and his mom a linguist at the Library of Congress.) George followed in their scholastic footsteps.
He earned his undergrad and his master’s degrees in mathematics and physics, then did a two-year stint as a junior statistician at the incredibly fun-sounding Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But academia still tugged at his heart, and by 1939, he was back in the classroom, this time at the University of California-Berkeley.
Dantzig had a reputation for being a diligent student, often studying far into the night. One particular night late in the year, he worked longer than usual, and he overdid it. The result was the same crisis college students still experience today.
He overslept.
Throwing on his clothes as fast as he could, he dashed across campus, thinking he might at least catch the final portion of his statistics class and explain what happened to his professor.
But when Dantzig entered the room 30 minutes late, it was empty. Two math problems were written on a blackboard. Figuring it to be the homework assignment, he dutifully copied them down and returned to his room.
“They were a little harder than usual,” he acknowledged later, but he jumped into both with his usual scholarly gusto. In fact, he did little else but work on them for the next few days. When the homework was finished, he turned it in, along with a sheepish apology for having missed class.
A while later, there was a knock on his door. Dantzig opened it to find his instructor, Professor Jerzy Splawa-Neyman, bubbling over in nervous excitement.
“That wasn’t a homework assignment,” he said. The professor had written out two of the most intricately complex unanswered problems in the field. Their solution had evaded researchers for decades. “And you just solved them both!”
It was an accidental success, and it launched Dantzig’s amazing career. His discoveries had major benefits, both practical and academic. They helped shape the course of modern mathematics and had a profound influence on early computer research. If you’re reading this story online, Dantzig was one of the people whose work helped make that technology possible.
He put his talents to use in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, where he served in planning and logistics. Eventually becoming a professor at Stanford, his work was used to develop tools that revolutionized the optimization of large-scale systems.
The capstone of his career came on Oct. 18, 1976, when President Gerald Ford presented him with the prestigious National Medal of Science.
It was a long and distinguished academic journey that not only yielded many valuable results but also inspired hundreds of future researchers.
And George Dantzig owed it all to oversleeping and mistaking those two examples of unsolved problems on the blackboard for homework.
Editor’s note: J. Mark Powell is a novelist, former TV journalist and diehard history buff. Have a historical mystery that needs solving? A forgotten moment worth remembering? Send it to him at HolyCow@insidesources.com. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
