When George Dantzig, the future mathematician, was still a student, the following incident happened to him. The man took his studies very seriously and would often stay up the whole night. One day, he overslept a little because of this, and went to professor Neumann’s lecture 20 minutes late.
The student quickly wrote down the two tasks written on the board, thinking it was the homework. It took George several hours to solve the tasks and the next day he took them to the professor. The latter didn’t say anything. But a few weeks later, he broke into the George’s house at 6 a.m.
The student had found the correct answer to two previously unsolvable math problems. He didn’t even know about this, as he had missed the introduction to the lecture and the tasks on the board. In just two hours he managed to solve not one, but two tasks that mathematicians had been trying to solve for thousands of years. Even Einstein failed to find the correct answer.
George was not limited by the idea of these tasks being unsolvable. He just didn’t know it was impossible.
